The western United States has experienced such intense droughts over the past decade that technical descriptions are becoming inadequate. In many places, conditions are rocketing past “severe,” through “extreme,” all the way to “exceptional drought.”
The 2018 Four Corners drought — centered on the junction between Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico — put the region deep in the red. An abnormally hot spring and summer indicated that climate change was clearly at work, but that was about as much as most people could say of the situation at the time.
Climate scientists from UC Santa Barbara’s geography department have now distilled just how strong an effect human-induced warming had on that event. Their findings appear in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s annual issue dedicated to explaining extreme weather events during the previous year. The team found that 60 to 80% of the region’s increased potential for evaporation stemmed from human-induced warming alone, which caused additional warming of 2 degrees Celsius.
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
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