‘Hot Drought’ Unprecedented Across Western North America Since the 16th Century, Study Suggests
More heat, not just lack of rain, is drying soils in western North America, say researchers. (Photo: Kevin Krajick/Earth Institute)
Reconstructions of summer temperatures across western North America spanning the past 500 years suggest that concurrent heat and drought conditions, known as “hot drought,” have been unprecedented in frequency and severity over the past century. The findings are derived from tree-ring chronologies that show how changing temperatures relate to changes in soil moisture. They add to growing evidence that human-influenced warming has exacerbated climate extremes across the region.
The study, by researchers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and other institutions, was just published in the journal Science Advances.
Researchers have documented increasingly hot and dry conditions across western North America over the past two decades, often linking them to human-influenced warming. This includes a 2020 study employing data reaching back to the 800s, that showed human influence on the current drought. However, a lack of independent long-term temperature records to compare against long-term soil moisture records has made it difficult to discern whether the recent prevalence of hot droughts is beyond the region’s natural variability.
In the new study, lead author Karen King and colleagues mapped summer maximum temperatures across western North America from 1553 to 2020, using an extensive network of tree-ring chronologies. Combining these reconstructions with existing data on drought conditions, the researchers found that the past two decades have been among the warmest in five centuries across much of the western United States. High temperatures appear to have amplified soil moisture deficits and contributed substantially to the frequency, intensity, and spatial extent of drought conditions, the researchers found.
Regions such as the Great Plains and the Colorado River basin have been historically prone to severe hot drought, they note, but these past events weren’t as strongly influenced by high temperatures as they are today. The findings suggest that land-atmosphere interactions could play a more substantial role in the severity of recent megadroughts than past ones.
“The increasing prevalence of hot drought over the 20th and 21st centuries has important implications for future regional climate change adaptation strategies and for water resource management, particularly in the most historically drought-prone regions,” the authors write.
The study’s coauthors include Edward Cook, Benjamin Cook, Jason Smerdon and Richard Seager of Lamont-Doherty; Kevin Anchukaitis of the University of Arizona; and Grant Harley and Benjamin Spei of the University of Idaho. Karen King, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at Lamont-Doherty, is now at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Adapted from a press release by Science Advances.
