Global warming is assumed to accelerate the global water cycle. However, quantification of the acceleration and regional analyses remain open. Accordingly, in this study we address the fundamental hydrological question: Is the water cycle regionally accelerating/decelerating under global warming? For our investigation we have implemented the age-weighted regional water tagging approach into the Weather Research and Forecasting WRF model, namely WRF-age, to follow the atmospheric water pathways and to derive atmospheric water residence times accordingly. Moreover, we have implemented the three-dimensional online budget analysis of the total, tagged, and aged atmospheric water into WRF-age to provide a prognostic equation of the atmospheric water residence times. The newly developed, physics-based WRF-age model is used to regionally downscale the reanalysis of ERA-Interim and the MPI-ESM Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 scenario (RCP8.5) simulation exemplarily for an East Asian monsoon region, i.e., the Poyang Lake basin (the tagged moisture source area), for two 10-year slices of historical (1980-1989) and future (2040-2049) times. In comparison to the historical simulation, the future 2-meter temperature rises by +1.4 °C, evaporation increases by +6%, and precipitation decreases by -38% under RCP8.5 on average. In this context, global warming leads to regionally decreased residence times for the tagged water vapor by 8 hours and the tagged condensed moisture by 12 hours in the atmosphere, but increased transit times for the tagged precipitation by 4 hours over the land surface that is partly attributed to a slower fallout of precipitating moisture components in the atmosphere under global warming.