La Nina Means Not Enough Water To Seriously Dent Western Drought As Winter Draws To A Close

[hatrack]

EDIT

Now the West is in the winter wet season, but due, in part, to the La Niña weather pattern, too little rain and snow is falling to make up for the preceding dry months. Some rain and snow may still fall, but the National Weather Service’s seasonal forecast projects that drought conditions will persist across the Western US through May, the end of the current forecast period. “We do have some time to maybe put a dent in some of these deficits that we’ve seen through the winter,” said Fuchs. “Now the idea that we are going to catch up completely — that’s going to be tough.” The trajectory of this drought episode remains unclear, but scientists say that it is actually part of a bigger megadrought — a decades-long dry spell, punctuated by severe droughts.

EDIT

While natural variability has been a factor in recent droughts, the current megadrought is also being driven by climate change, according to the study. Higher temperatures, caused by greenhouse gases, have increased evaporation and decreased precipitation in the spring across the region. The researchers
were able to identify that climate change accounted for 46 percent of the drought’s severity.

Without climate change, there still would have been a drought, but “anthropogenic warming was critical for placing 2000–2018 on a trajectory consistent with the most severe past megadroughts,” they wrote. The current megadrought, which they traced from 2000 through 2018, was the second driest 19-year episode in the 1,200-year record. This finding is not just important for how we understand the current crisis, but also for the coming decades in the Western US as temperatures continue to climb.

The latest National Climate Assessment, authored by 13 US federal agencies in 2018, laid out a grim future for the Southwestern states: Rising temperatures will increase the likelihood of megadroughts in the region and make droughts more frequent and severe, according to the scientific literature cited. While annual precipitation in the Southwest may not necessarily decrease, the hotter annual temperatures will burn off more moisture, contributing to droughts, the researchers explained in the Science tree ring study.

EDIT

https://www.vox.com/2021/3/13/22324813/drought-california-snow-rain-west-colorado-wildfire-farms-water-climate-change

[Stevano]

1. Sad

We need water here.

[area51]

3. Welcome to DU.

[2naSalit]

2. Unless we have a rainy spring and summer...

We're toast. We don't have a healthy snow pack in the mountains that I can see which means we could have a lot of fires and smoke all summer.

[Random Boomer]

4. Move out of the Southwest

Seriously, move or start planning/saving to move. It's not just a matter of when the area will become uninhabitable, it's a matter of how long any property you own in the Southwest will maintain its value and how crowded other parts of the US will be as people being to stream out of the Southwest (and coastal regions). The longer you wait, the greater the risk that you'll be trapped there.

[NickB79]

5. This.

We've passed the point where the US Southwest is going to be habitable. Hard truth, but truth nonetheless. The warming already locked in, and the rapidly escalating positive feedbacks we're now seeing, make the prospect of staying under 2C almost impossible. And the perma-drought we're seeing now is with only 1.1C of warming. At 2C the region will be devastated.

The Pacific Northwest, Upper Midwest, Great Lakes, and New England states will be deluged with desperate climate refugees in 20-30 years. Don't wait until that point.