Droughts across the West are getting worse – and scientists warn it’s not going to get any better
Following months without rain, wildfire-ravaged Southern California has once again entered a concerning period of severe drought, new data showed.
Drought conditions – coupled with hurricane-force winds, low humidity and extremely dry vegetation – have helped make this month’s firefighting efforts challenging as deadly fires erupted around Los Angeles. More than a week later, the fires continue to burn.
Now, scientists are saying those dought conditions will continue to grow in the West and will likely get worse in the coming years thanks to climate change.
In a 40-year study published in the journal Science, scientists warn that extreme droughts will increase in frequency, severity and reach.
“Each year since 1980, drought-stricken areas have spread by an additional fifty thousand square kilometers on average — that’s roughly the area of Slovakia, or the U.S. states of Vermont and New Hampshire put together — causing enormous damage to ecosystems, agriculture, and energy production,” Institute of Science and Technology Austria Professor Francesca Pellicciotti said in a statement.
Government officials say that the future continues to look dry for the southern U.S. through April, while leaning wetter for northern states. Temperatures will also be warmer for much of the South, including the Southwest.
Droughts are caused by periods of drier-than-normal conditions, when little or no rain falls. Atmospheric conditions such as climate change and ocean temperatures factor into droughts.
The Los Angeles fires were likely linked to ocean heat, according to a recent Bloomberg report.
Last year was the warmest year on record for planet Earth, according to multiple scientific agencies. Recent research found that climate extremes last year wrought “havoc” on the global water cycle, contributing to “crippling droughts” in the Amazon Basin and southern Africa.
The West has long been plagued by such conditions. Droughts dry up the state’s water bodies and reservoirs, crack the Earth, and impact crop nutrient intake. Droughts can have major consequences for all of Earth’s inhabitants, resulting in food insecurity, forcing migration, and increasing illness and disease. Drought has also been tied to war.
Some 60 percent of all deaths caused by extreme weather events are caused by droughts, according to the United Nations. Recent drought and warm temperatures led to a spade of East Coast wildfires in December.
Using global meteorological data from between 1980 and 2018, researchers in Austria and Switzerland generated the “first” global picture of megadroughts and their impact on vegetation at high resolution. While they found a “worrying” increase in multi-year droughts, they said that long-term effects of the megadroughts remain largely unknown.
Various climate regions respond to drought episodes differently, with temperate grasslands the most affected in the past few decades.
The researchers noted that changes in greenness cannot be easily monitored over dense tropical forests using satellite images, leading to underestimated effects of drought there. They developed an analysis to better reveal those changes and ranked the droughts they recorded by their severity since 1980.
