Weather patterns in the southwestern part of the United States are changing from moisture states to drier climate states, according to a new federally funded study that analyzed data from climate patterns between 1979 and 2014.
Drier climate states are expected as a consequence of global warming, said the study lead author Andreas Prein of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Scientists concluded that rare will be the years when atmospheric conditions that bring rain and snow will overcome atmospheric conditions that create drier states.
Andreas Prein explained that droughts are also occurring more easily in the southwestern U.S. However, study authors did not emphasize in the effects of climate change in the increment of frequency and duration of droughts, but they are expecting to continue the investigations in order to understand the effects of global warming and droughts in the region.
“We show that in the North Atlantic and Midwest region precipitation intensity changes are the major driver of increasing precipitation trends. In the U.S. Southwest, however, weather type frequency changes lead to a significant precipitation decrease of up to −25% related to an increase in anticyclonic conditions in the North East Pacific,” wrote the authors in a study that was published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Results would appear to show that San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City and Cheyenne are the areas that are more prone to dry climate states, according to USA Today.
Mari Tye, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and study co-author, said that understanding how changing weather pattern frequencies impact total precipitation in the country is fundamental to water resource managers, because they can plan the construction of water storing infrastructures depending on registers of droughts and floods.
The study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, seems to suggest that when the Earth temperature increases, the ground turns drier and droughts occur more rapidly. Co-author Greg Holland explained that because of a decrease in the frequency of rainfalls in the Southeast, droughts are being more intense.
Droughts are already a worldwide problem. During the last three years, thousands of Syrians have been migrating to Europe as a consequence of war-related conflicts but also because of droughts in the region. Last year, some scientists expected the establishment of a U.N. body, specially dedicated to provide a warning system of droughts, during the U.N. climate event in New York City. However, the institution was not consolidated because governments are not putting enough attention to the problem, said analysts at The Guardian.
Source: Geophysical Research Letters
Oh, horrors, can you imagine if the author of this story were alive when the Ice Age was finishing up? Oh, horrors, we must save the ice and all live in animal skins!
I sure don’t understand how people like you can’t get the idea that the Ice Age was GRADUAL event that took CENTURIES to take place. I really don’t think climate change like we are experiencing will take that long. We are having a hard time dealing with just these small changes. Do you really think we’ll be ready for much bigger changes in just ten or twenty years?
And do you seriously think anything can be done when India and China is churning out all the exhaust they do? Nope.
Exactly my point. Those countries and the U.S are the top polluters in the world. All the conspiracy theorist claim that global warming doesn’t exist and if it did they say it has happened before so no big
deal anyway. Wrong. In fact they couldn’t be more wrong if they tried.
I’m not going to debate the issue if it is or not real because if you’ve made up your mind that it doesn’t then there is nothing I could say to convince you, however, lets just say for the sake of argument that it is happening.
It’s taking place at a rate most people cannot understand. The environmental impact in 50 years is going to HUGE. It’s already having a huge negative effect on the worlds biosphere. Think what would happen to the world economy as a whole if places that already have a hard time feeding the people when they can’t feed ANYONE at all. Like places in Africa. (Syria is one. People are leaving that country because of the drought also) And we are already seeing shifts in climates here in the U.S. that are adversely affecting farmers. (Look at California) And at the same time this is going on we have trouble all over the world with species of plants and animals being able to adapt to invading species that don’t belong there. I read one estimate that 15,000 species of plant, insect and animal are being introduced into the U.S. Every year. That alone has destabilized the ecology in so many countries and that has been going on every since world wide travel became an everyday thing. That’s not going to get better, ever. And sadly, what’s worse is that we can’t do a damn thing about it.
President Regan was the man who authorized the study of global warming and the man who finalized the report says that it is too late to change the rate of the warming trend. I don’t know how old you are but I will be gone before we see the worst results but I feel very sorry for succeeding generations who end up having to deal with it.
So we’re just supposed to shutdown industry, jobs, etc.? Granted India and China could reduce theirs, but they won’t, they’re just getting geared up.
Did you know by growing corn every spring/summer in the midwest, that it is 3 times the amount as the rain forest?
Animals, plants, etc. come and go. That’s been happening BEFORE man was even here. To kill thousands of jobs because of a spotted owl was absolutely ridiculous and it goes on and on from there.
Yes, we can curb some, but not go out as far as some would like… and the data that the scientists used to “confirm” climate change was indeed challenged, shown to be false, etc.