“There will still be variability, though, like higher heat and lower heat,” Lehner said. “We’re transitioning into a different state that has little to do with the last 50 or 100 years of statistics,” he said. Lehner explained that droughts or megadroughts are triggered naturally, but can be made worse by climate change. “People now ask if this is a ‘new normal,’ but – with worsening climate change – it’s rather a constantly changing world,” he said. The large ensemble simulations represent many possible futures and are used by climate scientists to derive robust statistics of decades ahead, Lehner said. “Here, we were able to better quantify the timing and spatial pattern of this transition using a so-called climate model large ensemble, which offers an unprecedented amount of data.” “If you think of a decade in the future, let’s say from 2090 to 2100, it’s going to be a warmer world and – in certain drought-prone areas – also consistently drier,” Lehner said. Joining Stevenson and Lehner on the paper is John Fasullo ’90, a project scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The paper was led by Samantha Stevenson, assistant professor, University of California, Santa Barbara. The research, “ Twenty-First Century Hydroclimate: A Continually Changing Baseline, With More Frequent Extremes,” published March 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “But that decade will also feature more extremes within that decade, than for example, a decade today.” The department is shared with the College of Engineering. “In the future, not only will a given decade probably be drier on average,” said co-author Flavio Lehner, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Coupled with worsening climate change, those droughts will likely be more dangerous and extreme. At the end of this century, scientists believe that megadroughts – extended drought events that can last two decades or more – will be more severe and longer than they are today in western United States.
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