Long-Term Aridity Changes in the Western United States

By E. Cook, C. Woodhouse, C. M. Eakin, D. Meko, D. Stahle. Science, 2004

1,603 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The western United States is experiencing a severe multiyear drought that is unprecedented in some hydroclimatic records. Using gridded drought reconstructions that cover most of the western United States over the past 1200 years, we show that this drought pales in comparison to an earlier period of elevated aridity and epic drought in AD 900 to 1300, an interval broadly consistent with the Medieval Warm Period. If elevated aridity in the western United States is a natural response to climate warming, then any trend toward warmer temperatures in the future could lead to a serious long-term increase in aridity over western North America.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9bcde2d38b3459a25d6a50a63c509e0d039fe70

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Drought Resistance in the Race Durango Dry Bean Landraces and Cultivars (2007, background): “The agricultural use of water in the western USA is .85% of total water use, moderate to severe intermittent or terminal drought is a common occurrence, and dry bean and most other crops cannot be grown without supplemental irrigation ( Cook et al., 2004 ).”
Large predators and trophic cascades in terrestrial ecosystems of the western United States (2009, methodology): “We used t-tests to identify any significant differences (p 0.05) in average PDSI between pre- and post-treatment periods for each park.”
KNMI Climate Explorer: A Web-Based Research Tool for High-Resolution Paleoclimatology (2013, background): “…1965) that incorporates lagged time series of precipitation and temperature, as well as soil characteristics, is comparable for different climate regimes, and is a useful drought metric in regions where drought rather than temperature is the limiting factor for tree growth (e.g. Cook et al. 2004).”
Efficacy of climate forcings (2005, result): “This model result is consistent with empirical evidence of strong droughts in the Southwest United States during past warm climates [Cook et al., 2004].”
Defining the limit to resistance in a drought‐tolerant grassland: long‐term severe drought significantly reduces the dominant species and increases ruderals (2011, background): “Warming and changes in precipitation are predicted to result in more frequent severe droughts in the western United States (Cook et al. 2004), and average drought length may be longer than those recorded in the instrumental record (MacDonald 2010; Woodhouse et al.”
Selection for Drought Resistance in Dry Bean Landraces and Cultivars (2006, background): “%) in the country (Solley, 1997) and a moderate to severe drought affects.50% of the cropped land (Cook et al., 2004; Miller et al., 2002).”
Evaluating wildland fire danger and prioritizing vegetation and fuels treatments (2007, methodology): “Fig. 10. Grid points of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), and drought map for the average of 20 years (1971‐1990) (adapted from Cook et al., 2004 ).”
Framework for Assessing Viability of Threatened and Endangered Chinook Salmon and Steelhead in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Basin (2007, methodology): “Spawning escapement data was obtained from California Department of Fish and Game’s 2005 GrandTab database, available from the Native Anadromous Fish & Watershed Branch, 830 S Street, Sacramento, CA 95814.”
Pine-oak forest dynamics five years after ecological restoration treatments, Arizona, USA (2005, background): “The below-average precipitation in 2000 and 2002 was especially severe across the Southwest (Cook et al., 2004).”