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One of the most pressing issues facing society and ecosystems as the planet warms isthe impact of a changing hydroclimate and its associated effects on drought, wild fire, and heat extremes. This is particularly true in arid and semi-arid regions where water resources are limited, and wildfire and heat extremes are already a significant threat. The US Southwest is a particularly clear example, having been dominated by drought for the last 20 y with recent extreme conditions that led to unprecedented water shortages in the Colorado River (1) and extreme wildfire seasons (2) that have almost certainly been exacerbated by greenhouse gas–driven warming and aridification (1, 3, 4). Burned forest area in the Southwest is highly correlated with vapor pressure deficit, the difference between saturation and actual vapor pressure (2, 5, 6), so drought impacts can stem from changes in precipitation, temperature, and atmospheric humidity. What kind of future hydroclimate extremes should the Southwest, and regions like it, be preparing for? Climate models, which simulate the complex interacting processes that govern the hydroclimate, are an important tool for answering this question. A challenge is that many of the relevant processes or quantities such as evapotranspiration, root zone soil moisture, and plant physiological changes have not been observed on the global scale or on the multi-decadal timescales over which the planet has been changing, to evaluate our models. We do, however, have a reasonably complete network of station-based near-surface atmospheric humidity measurements as well as reanalysis-based estimates of atmospheric water vapor (7–9). In some sense, near-surface water vapor should act as an integrator of how processes that are of relevance to the hydroclimate are evolving, so a discrepancy in atmospheric water vapor trends between models and observations would be indicative of something being wrong in our model representation of processes that are of relevance to the hydroclimate, assuming atmospheric water vapor observations can be trusted.