Looking at Helmholtz presentation, side 10. In my opinion this displays a large disturbance in the amazon, this seems to accord with slash and burn farming. Because replacing forest with farmland does not normally cause significant disruptions in the water cycle, because the plants change. But still transpire water.
Which is different from what is noted from the cost of Argentina, which is experiencing a loss of snow melt water, which was also clustered only around the mountain range. A result of snow melting earlier in the season.
Looking at slide 8 of Helena’s presentation, notice that a lot of anomalies occur in northern russia, near Siberia ? Same for some parts of Europe ? Those are not farming areas, those are wilderness areas. Which also have been subject to quite a few unchecked forest fires because there is no fire dept in those areas. As for what is noted in northern Canada, another large section of wilderness, also many fires but due to the size being much larger than the fires, my guess is that those are depicting permafrost melt, not drought, I don’t think drought conditions are typically associated with the northern wilderness of both Canada, Greenland and russia/siberia. However I could be wrong about the fires in those areas being as extensive, much more likely what we are seeing is vast amounts of permafrost melt, which is releasing both methane directly, as well as methane being produced by vast tracts of microorganisms. More likely than carbon transport from fires, this is a possible canary in the coal mine for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis or maybe a smoking gun ?So the areas with drought and farming, actually depicted less extreme changes, most likely because of being offset by irrigation.
I also have some questions about slide 11, the only graph where details are intelligible, is from 2002, the rest are too small to make out the details. Mostly to point out that india has done the worst job in water management and has been overly reliant on aquifers. So it shows an increase in territrial water which my guess is irrigation, but those aquifers are less than half full now, and the water from that as well as monsoons, typically get washed into the ocean instead of refilling the aquifers, so there is more rain yes, however the rapid urban development did not come with sewers or water management, combined with high clay content in many areas, results in water being drained into the ocean instead of replenishing aquifers. The same dynamic affects all major agricultural areas with the only exception being parts of the EU and Japan.