Science Source
Contribution of anthropogenic warming to California drought during 2012–2014
- Uses a suite of climate data sets and multiple representations of atmospheric moisture demand to calculate many estimates of the self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index, a proxy for near-surface soil moisture, across California from 1901 to 2014 at high spatial resolution
- Finds—based on the ensemble of calculations—that California drought conditions were record breaking in 2014, but probably not record breaking in 2012–2014, contrary to prior findings
- Finds that regionally, the 2012–2014 drought was record breaking in the agriculturally important southern Central Valley and highly populated coastal areas
- Examines contributions of individual climate variables to recent drought, including the temperature component associated with anthropogenic warming
- Finds that precipitation is the primary driver of drought variability but anthropogenic warming is estimated to have accounted for 8–27% of the observed drought anomaly in 2012–2014 and 5–18% in 2014
- Results indicate that although natural variability dominates, anthropogenic warming has substantially increased the overall likelihood of extreme California droughts
Related Content
Science Source
| AMS Journal of Climate
Is There a Role for Human-Induced Climate Change in the Precipitation Decline that Drove the California Drought?
Richard Seager, Naomi Henderson, Mark A. Cane et al
Science Source
| AMS Journal of Hydrometeorology
Indications for Protracted Groundwater Depletion after Drought over the Central Valley of California
S.-Y. Simon Wang
Science Source
| Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
EEE 2013: Causes of the Extreme Dry Conditions Over California During Early 2013
Hailan Wang and Siegfried Schubert
Science Source
| Nature Climate Change
California from drought to deluge
S.-Y. Simon Wang, Jin-Ho Yoon, Emily Becker and Robert Gillies
