Farmers in the US West know they have a drought, but may not yet realise these arid years could become a megadrought.

LONDON, 17 April, 2020 – Climate change could be pushing the US west and northern Mexico towards the most severe and most extended period of drought observed in a thousand years of US history, a full-blown megadrought.

Natural atmospheric forces have always triggered prolonged spells with little rain. But warming driven by profligate human use of fossil fuels could now be making a bad situation much worse.

The warning of what climate scientists call a megadrought – outlined in the journal Science – is based not on computer simulations but on direct testimony from more than a century of weather records and the much longer story told by 1200 consecutive years of evidence preserved in the annual growth rings of trees that provide a record of changing levels of soil moisture.

“Earlier studies were largely model projections of the future. We are no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now,” said Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in the US.

“We now have enough observations of current drought and tree ring records of past drought to say we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.”

Repeating the past

Previous research has already linked catastrophic drought to turmoil among pre-Columbian civilisations in the American Southwest.

Studies by other groups have also warned that what happened in the past could happen again, as carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion enrich the atmosphere, raise temperatures and parch the soils of the US West.

Global heating has been repeatedly linked to the last devastating drought in California, and to the possible return of Dust Bowl conditions in the Midwestern grain belt.

The latest study delivers a long-term analysis of conditions across nine US states, from Oregon and Montana in the north down to California, New Mexico and part of northern Mexico.

With the evidence preserved in old tree trunks, the scientists identified dozens of droughts in the region from 800 AD. They found four megadroughts – periods in which the conditions became extreme – between 800 and 1600. Since then there have been no droughts that could be matched with these – so far.

And then the researchers matched the megadrought tree ring evidence with soil moisture records collected in the first 19 years of this century, and compared this with any 19-year period in the prehistoric droughts.

“We’ll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to get into drought”

They found that the current prolonged dry spell is already more pronounced than the three earliest records of megadrought. The fourth megadrought – it ran from 1575 to 1603 – may still have been the worst of all, but the match with the present years is so close that nobody can be sure.

But the team behind the Science study is sure of one thing. This drought right now is affecting wider stretches of landscape more consistently than any of the earlier megadroughts, and this, they say, is a signature of global heating. All the ancient megadroughts lasted longer, and sometimes much longer, than 19 years, but all began in a way very similar to the present.

The snowpack in the western high mountains has fallen dramatically, the flow of the rivers has dwindled, lake levels have fallen, farmers have been  hit and the wildfires have become more prolonged and more intense.

Drought and even the chance of megadrought may be a fact of life in the US West. During occasional natural atmospheric cycles, the tropical Pacific cools and storm tracks shift further north, taking rainfall away from the US drylands.

But since 2000, average air temperatures in the western states have risen by more than 1.2°C above the normal over earlier centuries. So soils already starved of rain began to lose their stored moisture at an ever-increasing rate.

Worsened by heating

Without the additional global heating, this drought might have happened anyway, and perhaps even been the 11th worst ever recorded, rather than almost the worst ever in human experience.

“It doesn’t matter if this is exactly the worst drought ever,” said Benjamin Cook, a co-author, from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “What matters is that it has been made much worse than it could have been because of climate change.”

The researchers also found that the 20th century was the wettest century in the entire 1200 year record, and this relatively plentiful supply of water must have helped enrich the US West and make California, for instance, become the Golden State, the most populous in the US.

“Because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded towards longer and more severe droughts,” Professor Williams said. “We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while.

“But going forward, we’ll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to get into drought.” – Climate News Network