Current Record Drought In American West Likely To Continue For Years

[hatrack]

?w=1080
Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post
A woman fly fishes in the receding waters of Green Mountain Reservoir in Heeney, Colo., on Aug. 31, 2021. The reservoir was built to replace water to the Colorado River that is diverted to the Front Range through the Big Thompson Project. At the time it was about 17 billion gallons below normal.

Not only is the American West the driest it’s been in more than a millennia but the megadrought is likely to continue for years, diminishing Colorado’s already short water supply and increasing the risk of wildfires, climatologists say.

The current, 22-year-long megadrought plaguing the West surpassed the megadrought in the late 1500s, previously considered the worst on record, according to a study published this week in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change. Plus, about 42% of this megadrought’s severity can be blamed on climate change caused by humans.

Soil moistures, increasing temperatures and climate modeling shows a 94% chance that the drought will continue for a 23rd year, Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said. And there is a 75% chance that the megadrought will continue through its 30th year in 2029, Smerdon, also a co-author of the study, said.

EDIT

The Nature Climate Change study, which examined soil moisture and data collected in tree rings, showed that severe megadroughts have occurred throughout the earth’s history, Smerdon said, but human development and the outpouring of greenhouse gas emissions worsened the effects of these naturally occurring droughts. “This would have been a dry period, absent human influence, but it wouldn’t have been as severe, as long or as uniformly widespread in the southwest,” Smerdon said.

EDIT

https://www.denverpost.com/2022/02/19/colorado-megadrought-study-years/