A new study shows that Earth’s warming climate has made the western drought about 40 percent more severe, making it the region’s driest stretch since A.D. 800
There have been brief moments of reprieve in the drought that has stretched on since 2000 in the western United States—a water-rich 2011, a snow-laden 2019—but those breaks have only highlighted the more dramatic feature of the last few decades: unrelenting dryness.
But understanding what controls that variability, and its relationship to climate change, is critically important to everyone living in the region's boom-bust water cycle. Soil moisture is a particularly useful way of assessing drought, says Brad Udall, a climate scientist at Colorado State University. Most people don’t think much about soil moisture, but it is “the reservoir upon which all life depends,” he says, because it sustains plants, the basis of all other life.
When they published their analysis, the current drought looked like it would rank as one of the worst droughts on record, but not quite: The fourth megadrought in the 1500s had been drier, and all the previous megadroughts had lasted longer. But 2019, when they were analyzing the data, was a wet year. “We really thought it might be ending,” says Williams.
“This would have been a garden-variety drought,” says Connie Woodhouse, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, who was not involved with the study. “But with warming…wow. And this is because of our own doing.”Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.: The drought gripping the U.S. West is the taking a devastating toll on agriculture, farmers say.: A man walks by homes burned by the Marshall Fire on December 31, 2021 in Louisville, Colorado.
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