Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America

doi:10.1126/science.1139601

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Published Online April 5, 2007
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1139601

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Submitted on January 5, 2007
Accepted on March 26, 2007

Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America

Richard Seager ¹, Mingfang Ting ¹, Isaac Held ², Yochanan Kushnir ¹, Jian Lu ³, Gabriel Vecchi ⁴, Huei-Ping Huang ¹, Nili Harnik ⁵, Ants Leetmaa ⁴, Ngar-Cheung Lau ², Cuihua Li ¹, Jennifer Velez ¹, Naomi Naik ¹

¹ Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA.
² NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, USA; Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
³ National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA. 5Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
⁴ NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, USA.
⁵ Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.

How anthropogenic climate change will impact hydroclimate inthe arid regions of Southwestern North America has implicationsfor the allocation of water resources and the course of regionaldevelopment. Here we show that there is a broad consensus amongstclimate models that this region will dry significantly in the21st century and that the transition to a more arid climateshould already be underway. If these models are correct, thelevels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought, or the DustBowl and 1950s droughts, will, within the coming years to decades,become the new climatology of the American Southwest.

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:

Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States.: T. P. Barnett, D. W. Pierce, H. G. Hidalgo, C. Bonfils, B. D. Santer, T. Das, G. Bala, A. W. Wood, T. Nozawa, A. A. Mirin, et al. (2008)
Science 319, 1080-1083
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