Sentences with word «megadrought»

Researchers find 80 percent chance of megadrought in American West due to climate change this century Dust storm in Texas during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

The atlases together show persistently drier - than - average conditions across north - central Europe over the past 1,000 years, and a history of megadroughts in the Northern Hemisphere that lasted longer during the Medieval Climate Anomaly than they did during the 20th century.

Natural (non-human-induced) variability is still likely the dominant cause of today's droughts, and clearly was for megadroughts evidenced in the paleoclimate record.

However, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase along current trajectories throughout the 21st century, there is an 80 percent likelihood of a decades - long megadrought in the Southwest and Central Plains between the years 2050 and 2099.

12:45 - 13:00 Sahel megadrought during Heinrich Stadial 1: Evidence for a three - phase evolution of the low - andmid - level West African wind system Ilham Bouimetarhan, Matthias Prange, Enno Schefuß, Lydie Dupont, Jörg Lippold, Stefan Mulitza, Karin Zonneveld

Further research, including manned submersible sampling and sonar analysis, has revealed the ancient shoreline that emerged during a 200 - year megadrought in the Sierra Nevada between the 9th and 12th centuries, one of many going even further back in time, when precipitation in the area dropped dramatically and the lake level dropped to roughly 200 feet below its current level.

Seager, Richard, Robert Burgman, Yochanan Kushnir, Amy Clement, Ed Cook, Naomi Naik and Jennifer Miller: Tropical Pacific forcing of North American Medieval megadroughts: Testing the concept with an atmosphere model forced by coral - reconstructed SSTs, Journal of Climate, doi: 10.1175 / 2008JCLI2170.1

Aug. 26, 2016 — Paleoclimatic cave study in California is designed to identify the factors that made megadroughts commonplace in the western U.S. from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago.

They estimated that the most recent megadrought happened at the end of the 16th century.

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Sahel megadrought during Heinrich Stadial 1: Evidence for a three - phase evolution of the low - and mid-level West African wind system Ilham Bouimetarhan, Matthias Prange, Enno Schefuss, Lydie Dupont, Jörg Lippold, Stefan Mulitza, Karin Zonneveld

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year.

The Medieval Climate Anomaly, which lasted from the years C.E. 1100 to 1300, was a period when megadroughts were more common than they are in our modern age.

This will create what the study calls «a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterized the Medieval era.»

In previous research, Overpeck and other colleagues showed current climate models simulated 20th - century conditions well, but the models can not simulate the 20 - to 60 - year megadroughts known to have occurred in the past.

Better forecasts could help water managers, farmers and other industries in the West that rely on water, especially with projections for megadrought looming for the region by mid-century.

This makes the risk of megadrought increases to 99 percent.

In the previous megadroughts, they are associated with unrelenting multiyear La Niña conditions.

And just last year, climatologist Jonathan Overpeck warned that humanity is at danger of forcing «abrupt shifts to drier conditions, including possible decadal megadrought.»

«When considering the West as a whole, we are currently in the midst of a historically relevant megadrought,» said Williams, a professor at the Lamont - Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.

Findings strongly hint at prospect of megadrought if global warming continues.

When these past megadroughts are compared side - by - side with computer model projections of the 21st century, both the moderate and business - as - usual emissions scenarios are drier, and the risk of droughts lasting 30 years or longer increases significantly.

«For the southwestern U.S., I'm not optimistic about avoiding real megadroughts,» said Toby Ault, Cornell assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and lead author of the paper.

As a society, we've weighted the dice toward megadrought.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

It would cut the future risk of megadroughts almost in half, he says.

The daunting conclusion was that a 2 °C rise in atmospheric temperatures would be enough to increase the risk of such sustained megadroughts in the region from once in a thousand years to a 50 % chance before the end of this century.

Climate models have had difficulty reproducing megadroughts of the past, indicating something may be missing in their representation of the climate system, Cook said.

The hemispheric scale adds to the potential uses of what was already the gold standard of paleo - hydroclimate research, said Sloan Coats, a climate dynamicist at the University of Colorado who studies megadroughts using the atlases.

In this study, we demonstrate that the Little Ice Age (LIA, ~ 1400 — 1850 CE) might be more representative of future hydroclimatic variability than the conditions during the MCA megadroughts for the American Southwest, and thus provide a useful scenario for development of future water - resource management and drought and flood hazard mitigation strategies.

A recent study shows that rains and mountain snows are drying up, and many experts already believe the region has entered a multidecade megadrought.

Researchers have developed the first year - by - year record of rainfall in sub-Saharan West Africa for the past 3,000 years, and identified a daunting pattern: a 30 - to -60-year cycle of serious droughts that last a decade or more, punctuated by killer megadroughts that last for centuries.

In just a few decades, a huge swath of the US could experience the biggest megadrought that the US has seen in 1,000 years.

No one knows what megadroughts, which can last from 30 - 50 years, look like.

(NASA Goddard via YouTube) The US is on track for a record - breaking megadrought.

Stahle, D.W., E.R. Cook, M.K. Cleaveland, D. Therrell, D. Meko, H.D. Grissino - Mayer, E. Watson, and B.H. Luckman, 2000: Tree - ring data document 16thcentury megadrought over North America, EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, 81 (12), 121,125.

He also noted that, with or without human - caused global warming, from California to sub-Saharan Africa, the forces driving megadroughts and other climate - system threats are still poorly understood.