Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains

By B. Cook, T. Ault, Jason E. Smerdon. Science Advances, 2015

1,376 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Evidence suggests that Western North America will be drier at the end of the 21st century than any period of the last 1000 years. In the Southwest and Central Plains of Western North America, climate change is expected to increase drought severity in the coming decades. These regions nevertheless experienced extended Medieval-era droughts that were more persistent than any historical event, providing crucial targets in the paleoclimate record for benchmarking the severity of future drought risks. We use an empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals. This desiccation is consistent across most of the models and moisture balance variables, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed. Notably, future drought risk will likely exceed even the driest centuries of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (1100–1300 CE) in both moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) future emissions scenarios, leading to unprecedented drought conditions during the last millennium.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a3042d65682805140a1013cd2e7af4ec8b261b4

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Citations in the corpus

Ecological effects of extreme drought on Californian herbaceous plant communities (2016, background): “Our results suggest the vulnerability of this exceptional flora to droughts, which are expected to increase in intensity and frequency due to rising temperatures and increasingly variable precipitation (Thorne et al. 2009, Cook et al. 2015, Diffenbaugh et al. 2015, Williams et al. 2015).”
A copula‐based nonstationary frequency analysis for the 2012–2015 drought in California (2016, background): “Specifically, California has been characterized by periodic drought and evidence of cyclical megadrought that lasted nearly a decade between 900 and 1300 A.D. as identified in paleoclimate studies [Cook et al., 2010, 2015 Griffin and Anchukaitis, 2014; MacDonald, 2007; Schimmelmann et al., 2003].”
Density‐dependent vulnerability of forest ecosystems to drought (2017, background): “Climate change is expected to increase drought frequency and intensity (Dai 2013; Cook, Ault & Smerdon 2015), with potentially serious negative consequences for forest ecosystem structure and function (Allen et al. 2010; Anderegg, Kane & Anderegg 2013).”
A hybrid framework for assessing socioeconomic drought: Linking climate variability, local resilience, and demand (2015, background): “…drought during 2012–2015 resulting in record low storage and significant water stress on the system [Shukla et al., 2015; AghaKouchak et al., 2014a, 2014b; Cook et al., 2015; Griffin and Anchukaitis, 2014; Swain et al., 2014; Diffenbaugh et al., 2015; Mann and Gleick, 2015; Mao et al.,2015].”
Fire and tree death: understanding and improving modeling of fire-induced tree mortality (2018, background): “Moreover, trees may be more sensitive to fire-caused injury following episodes of drought-stress (van Mantgem et al 2013), which may become more frequent in many regions with continued warming (Cook et al 2015).”
Soil microbiomes and climate change (2019, neutral): “At a global level, drought is expected to be the major consequence of future climate change in grassland regions over the next several decades 31 .”
Changes in the convective population and thermodynamic environments in convection-permitting regional climate simulations over the United States (2017, background): “2017), and may also be related to a general loss of soil moisture in the central US due to enhanced evapotranspiration in a warmer climate (Cook et al. 2015).”
The Regional Hydroclimate Response to Stratospheric Sulfate Geoengineering and the Role of Stratospheric Heating (2019, background): “Over California, reduced precipitation in the spring and autumn (not shown, Swain et al., 2018), together with enhanced evapotranspiration in a warmer climate (Cook et al., 2015), lead to a reduction in soil moisture throughout the year under RCP8.”