system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Where does the water go in drought?

Im from Germany, and like many places in Europe, we lose a lot of water this summer. 
In school I learned there is and was always a fix amount of water on this planet. 
So my question is, when the soil is dry, the rivers are draining and there is no rain, where is all the water?
gpt
The ocean.

It's a more complicated cycle than what we're taught in school. Everything is connected.

Ordinarily water evaporates from the ocean. As the air moves it cools and condenses over land (th, and releases the water as snow or rain. During the colder months it freezes (snowpack, glaciers, etc), largely at higher altitudes, and collects in lakes and aquifers. 

As temperatures rise, in many places water still evaporates into the air, but it doesn't cool enough to release the water, causing high humidity- this is linked to why deserts are hot and dry and tropics are hot and humid). 

Simultaneously, rivers come from somewhere and move to the ocean, and that somewhere is the snowpack and glaciers mentioned earlier. As it melts during hotter months it slowly releases water into streams and those form rivers, which dump out into the ocean, where the cycle of evaporation starts over. If the air didn't cool enough to form enough snow or snowpack, then the next summer there won't be as much left in reserve to melt and run into streams. And to compound the problem, temperatures are erractically rising too fast sometimes, causing large amounts of snowpack or glaciers to break and melt and flood all at once in early spring instead of slowly throughout the year.