Climate: Are you ready for a western megadrought?

Long-term climate trends suggest that drought will become much more common across the West in the coming century, potentially redefining our definitions of wet and dry years, according to a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience. The study started by looking at the chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004, which was the most intense dry spell in about 800 years, according to tree-ring records. That multi-year drought helped propel the pine beetle epidemic to epic proportions and left many river basins depleted, but the researcher said those conditions could become the new norm for most of the coming century. “Climatic extremes such as this will cause more large-scale droughts and forest mortality, and the ability of vegetation to sequester carbon is going to decline,” said Beverly Law, a co-author of the study, professor of global change biology and terrestrial systems science in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, and former science director of AmeriFlux, an ecosystem observation network. See full Article.