Climate Change Blamed Over the Intensifying Drought in California

According to a report from Gizmodo, the rising global temperatures appear to be exacerbating the heavy drought conditions now affecting much of the Western U.S.

Last year, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sponsored a study that blamed the rain deficit on a persistent ridge of high-pressure air over the northeast Pacific, which has been blocking moisture-laden ocean air from reaching land. Just like a puddle evaporates quickly on warm days, soils too dry out quickly in warmer years which is becoming increasingly frequent in many locations around the globe.

As such, without warmth catching nursery gas emanations bringing about temperatures to rise, the dry spell would have been 8% to 27% less serious than it is, said John Abatzoglou, a University of Idaho atmosphere scientist and coauthor of a study distributed Thursday in the diary Geophysical Research Letters.

Study researchers were able to know the percentage using a model built on historical data.

Researchers suggest that the drought in California is worsening due to the worldwide rising temperatures. It has been noticed that in the last few years, natural climate precipitations have declined significantly and temperatures have increased alarmingly.

Warming caused by humans meantime calls for additional moisture in the atmosphere when water resources are already constrained for human and natural systems and severe shortages are experienced. It is fair to say that humans are costing California more water every year.

My colleagues and I quantified the effect of global warming on the recent California drought using a computational soil-moisture accounting approach. In this method, California is treated as a grid of 24,000 buckets placed side by side with each of them reckoned as a seven square kilometre area. Annual changes in the water content of the buckets during the summer months indicate annual changes in California water balance and can therefore be evaluated to determine the severity of the current California drought. Combined with the increased evaporative demand due to global warming, this naturally occurring drought event produced record, or near record, drought throughout much of California. As a result, in about 45 years, “more or less permanent drought will set in, interrupted only by the rainiest years”.

Williams continued, saying that even though California will certainly have wet days again, these showers will only precede an even drier and more arid future.

Republished from The Conversation.