Humans to Blame for Higher Drought Risk in Some Regions
https://eos.org/research-spotlights/humans-to-blame-for-higher-drought-risk-in-some-regions
Source: By Sarah Stanley, Eos/AGU
Excerpt: The world’s population relies on the global water cycle for food security and economic prosperity. However, human activities may be jeopardizing this critical resource; new research by Douville and Plazzotta confirms that human emissions of greenhouse gases have already begun to alter the water cycle, resulting in a drying trend and increased risk of drought in certain parts of the world. To many researchers, these new findings are not surprising. For more than a decade, observational and numerical modeling studies have predicted that anthropogenic emissions would cause warming that could change the water cycle and expand dry regions. Nonetheless, other recent studies have cast serious doubts on these predictions. Two studies cautioned that simplified calculations used to process observational data could result in incorrect predictions of evaporation due to warming over land. Other researchers uncovered large uncertainties in climate predictions made by the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), a widely used, multimodel tool for climate analysis. The authors of the new study set out to address these doubts. They performed a three-pronged analysis, investigating both recent observational data and long-term CMIP5 projections of drying trends over the midlatitudes of the northern continents in summertime. ...Meanwhile, the authors say, addressing anthropogenic global warming should remain a central strategy to maintain water supplies and food security around the world....
Source: By Sarah Stanley, Eos/AGU
Excerpt: The world’s population relies on the global water cycle for food security and economic prosperity. However, human activities may be jeopardizing this critical resource; new research by Douville and Plazzotta confirms that human emissions of greenhouse gases have already begun to alter the water cycle, resulting in a drying trend and increased risk of drought in certain parts of the world. To many researchers, these new findings are not surprising. For more than a decade, observational and numerical modeling studies have predicted that anthropogenic emissions would cause warming that could change the water cycle and expand dry regions. Nonetheless, other recent studies have cast serious doubts on these predictions. Two studies cautioned that simplified calculations used to process observational data could result in incorrect predictions of evaporation due to warming over land. Other researchers uncovered large uncertainties in climate predictions made by the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), a widely used, multimodel tool for climate analysis. The authors of the new study set out to address these doubts. They performed a three-pronged analysis, investigating both recent observational data and long-term CMIP5 projections of drying trends over the midlatitudes of the northern continents in summertime. ...Meanwhile, the authors say, addressing anthropogenic global warming should remain a central strategy to maintain water supplies and food security around the world....