Warm, wet summers are historically unusual and could bring unexpected disruptions to ecosystems and society, according to new research from the University of British Columbia.
As climate change raises summer temperatures around the world, increases in precipitation could offset drought risk in some regions. However, a paper published in Nature Communications this month shows that wetter summers may bring other problems in a warming climate.
“Terrestrial climates around the world tend to alternate between cool, wet summers in some years and warm, dry summers in other years,” said UBC forestry PhD candidate Colin Mahony, lead author of the study. “But climate change is driving many climates towards warmer and wetter conditions. We found that where temperature and precipitation are increasing together, climates are changing faster than the temperature trend alone would suggest.”
Warmer, wetter summers could produce unexpected impacts, such as disease outbreaks and crop failures, because they break the climatic norms that ecosystems and human communities are adapted to.
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Image via University of British Columbia.