Look down from a plane at farms in the Great Plains and the West and you’ll see green circles dotting the countryside, a kind of agricultural pointillism.

They’re from center-pivot sprinklers. But some farmers are finding older versions of these systems, many built 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, aren’t keeping up with today’s hotter reality, said Meetpal Kukal, an agricultural hydrologist at the University of Idaho. “There’s a gap between how much water you can apply and what the crop demands are,” he said.

By the time the sprinkler’s arm swings back around to its starting point, the soil has nearly dried out. The main culprit? Atmospheric thirst.

“A hotter world is a thirstier one,” said Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford. He led a new study, published

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