CALIFORNIA'S 100-YEAR DROUGHT

Original Story: USAToday.com

California is in the third year of one of the state's worst droughts in the past century, one that's led to fierce wildfires, water shortages and restrictions, and potentially staggering agricultural losses.

The dryness in California is only part of a longer-term, 15-year drought across most of the Western USA, one that bioclimatologist Park Williams said is notable because "more area in the West has persistently been in drought during the past 15 years than in any other 15-year period since the 1150s and 1160s" — that's more than 850 years ago.

"When considering the West as a whole, we are currently in the midst of a historically relevant megadrought," said Williams, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.

Megadroughts are what Cornell University scientist Toby Ault calls the "great white sharks of climate: powerful, dangerous and hard to detect before it's too late. They have happened in the past, and they are still out there, lurking in what is possible for the future, even without climate change." Ault goes so far as to call megadroughts "a threat to civilization."

WHAT IS A MEGADROUGHT?

Megadroughts are defined more by their duration than their severity. They are extreme dry spells that can last for a decade or longer, according to research meteorologist Martin Hoerling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Megadroughts have parched the West, including present-day California, long before Europeans settled the region in the 1800s.

Most of the USA's droughts of the past century, even the infamous 1930s Dust Bowl that forced migrations of Oklahomans and others from the Plains, "were exceeded in severity and duration multiple times by droughts during the preceding 2,000 years," the National Climate Assessment reported this year.

The difference now, of course, is the Western USA is home to more than 70 million people who weren't here for previous megadroughts. The implications are far more daunting.

Overall, "the nature of the beast is that drought is cyclical, and these long periods of drought have been commonplace in the past," according to Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb. "We are simply much more vulnerable today than at any time in the past. People can't just pick up and leave to the degree they did in the past."

Ault agrees that this long-term Western dry spell could be classified as a megadrought. "But this is not as bad as it could get," he warned.

How do scientists know how wet or dry it was centuries ago? Though no weather records exist before the late 1800s, scientists can examine paleoclimatic "proxy data," such as tree rings and lake sediment, to find out how much — or little — rain fell hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

At the most simplistic level, tree rings are wider during wet years and narrower during dry years.

"Prolonged droughts — some of which lasted more than a century — brought thriving civilizations, such as the ancestral Pueblo (Native Americans) of the Four Corners region, to starvation, migration and finally collapse, " Lynn Ingram, a geologist at the University of California-Berkeley, wrote in her recent book The West Without Water.

Ault says decade-long droughts happen once or twice a century in the Western USA, but much worse droughts, ones that last for multiple decades, occur once or twice per millennium.

Has California reached megadrought status? Not yet: "This one wouldn't stand out as a megadrought," Hoerling said. Even so, "this is the state's worst consecutive three years for precipitation in 119 years of records," he said.

As of Aug. 28, 100% of the state of California was considered to be in a drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. More than 58% is in "exceptional" drought, the worst level. Record warmth has fueled the drought as the state sees its hottest year since records began in 1895, the National Climatic Data Center reports.

Because of the dryness, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a statewide drought emergency this year. Since then, reservoir storage levels have continued to drop, and as of late August, they were down to about 59% of the historical average.

Regulations restricting outdoor water use were put in place in late July for the entire state. People aren't allowed to hose down driveways and sidewalks, nor are they allowed to water lawns and landscapes (if there is excess runoff). There are reports of wells running dry in central California.

About 1,000 more wildfires than usual have charred the state, including some unusual ones in the spring.

The drought is likely to inflict $2.2 billion in losses on the agricultural industry, according to a July study from the University of California-Davis.

HOW BAD CAN IT GET IN CALIFORNIA?

"If California suffered something like a multi-decade drought," University of Arizona climate scientist Gregg Garfin said, "the best-case scenario would be some combination of conservation, technological improvements (such as desalinization plants), multi-state cooperation on the drought, economic-based water transfers from agriculture to urban areas and other things like that to get humans through the drought.

"But there would be consequences for ecosystems and agriculture," he said.

"In the worst-case scenario, there might be out-migration and/or ghost towns," Garfin said. As a way to avoid this, "we could simply suck down more and more groundwater, which would have its own set of ramifications for local aquifers and the environment."

Even in the worst case of severe multi-decade drought, "it is hard for me to imagine people and businesses being banned from moving into urban areas of California," he said.

"We have much better resilience now than in the 'ghost town days,' with the ability to drill deeper, along with various ways of importing water and trading for water," Garfin said. "A more subtle way of restricting people (not banning them) is what Santa Fe has done — where new housing developments must either come with their own new source of water, or they must offset the water through conservation."

Overall, if the drought worsened, "we'd have to learn how to use water more efficiently," Ault said. "This is a glimpse of the future."

ROLE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

What role does climate change play in this drought or in future droughts?

Scientists such as Hoerling and Ault say they don't have the tools to tease out how much of this specific drought might be attributed to climate change.

"As of now, probably very little of the California drought can be attributed to climate change with any certainty," said tree-ring scientist Edward Cook of Lamont-Doherty.

Overall, past droughts have probably been due to subtle changes in water temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Cooler water temperatures — known as La Niñas — tend to produce drier conditions in the West.

Droughts in North America's "Medieval Warm Period" (roughly 950-1250) were associated with high temperatures in the Southwest and were probably caused by persistently cool La Niña-like conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Since 2000, the dominant climate pattern has been La Niña.

Hoerling noted that some computer models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations science panel, show that California could actually see more, not less, winter rain and snow because of climate change.

However, overall rising temperatures would tend to favor more droughts, University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck said.

"It's been anomalously hot recently, which was not likely to have occurred without global warming," Overpeck said. "The odds are only going up that we could have a megadrought as the Earth warms."

Trends toward warmer temperatures could lead to a long-term dry spell in the region, according to a 2004 study led by Cook in the journal Science.

What's troubling is that the 20th century — during which time California's population increased from about 1.5 million to almost 40 million — may well have been an outlier, an unusually wet century: "Overall, the 20th century experienced less drought than most of the preceding four to 20 centuries," the Science study said.

Ault continues to investigate the relationship between climate change and megadroughts and the likelihood that an even more severe megadrought might hit in the next hundred years in the Southwest — one that's worse than any other drought in the past 1,000 years.

Specifically because of global warming, Ault says, the chances of the Southwestern USA experiencing a decade-long drought is at least 50% (but may be closer to 80%-90%), and the chances of a three-decade-long megadrought range from 20% to 50% over the next century. Ault is writing a study about this that will be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate.

"For the Southwestern U.S., I'm not optimistic about avoiding real megadroughts," Ault said. "As we add greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — and we haven't put the brakes on stopping this — we are weighting the dice for megadrought conditions.

"The risks would be lower if we didn't warm the planet as much as is expected to occur, but they aren't zero, because we know these things happen naturally," he said.

This is serious stuff: "Megadroughts are a threat to civilization," Ault said at an American Geophysical Union conference this year. "They could possibly be even worse than anything experienced by any humans who have lived in that part of the world for the last few thousand years."

New Mexico Wildfires Still Rage

Story first appeared on MSNBC.

A smoky haze hangs over the rugged canyons and tree-covered expanses of southwestern New Mexico as the largest wildfire in the state's recorded history marches across more of the Gila Wilderness.

The virtually unchecked wildfire is fueling experts' predictions that this is a preview of things to come as states across the West contend with a dangerous recipe of wind, low humidity and tinder-dry fuels.

The Whitewater-Baldy blaze has charred more than 190,000 acres, or nearly 300 square miles, in Gila National Forest and has become the largest wildfire burning in the country.

The Governor viewed the fire from a New Mexico National Guard helicopter Thursday and saw the thick smoke shrouding some of the steep canyons that are inaccessible to firefighters. She described the terrain as "impossible," saying there was no way for firefighters to directly attack the flames in the rugged areas of wilderness.

Along the fire's northern edge, she spotted crews doing burnout operations designed to slow the erratic blaze, which has surpassed last year's Las Conchas fire as the state's largest ever. That fire charred 156,593 acres and threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation's premier nuclear facility.

From the air, she could see the blanket of smoke stretching for miles. She used words like daunting and enormous, fitting since fire managers said the blaze could smolder until the region gets significant rainfall during the summer monsoon season.

More than 1,200 firefighters are at the massive blaze near the Arizona border. It has destroyed a dozen cabins and eight outbuildings, a fire information officer said. New Mexico Steel Carport companies have already seen an impact on sales and service levels due to the blaze.

Experts say persistent drought, climate change and shifts in land use and firefighting strategies mean other western states likely will see similar giant fires this season.

The area has been in a long drought cycle for the last 20 years, and conditions now are great for these type of fires.

Agencies in New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona are bracing for the worst. Many counties have established emergency telephone and email notification systems to warn of wildfires, and most states have enlisted crews from other jurisdictions to be ready when the big ones come.
It's highly likely that these fires are going to get so big that states are going to need outside resources to fight them.

According to the National Weather Service, a dry climate is expected to prolong drought conditions across the Great Basin and central Rockies during the fire season. Large portions of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico will remain under severe drought conditions.

A lack of moisture means fewer fuels to burn in some areas, but unburned vegetation elsewhere could pose a problem since many states received no sustained snow or rain this winter and spring.

That's what happened in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, where a lack of snow failed to push down grass, which worsened the fire danger.

Typically, fires in the area don't cross the middle fork of the Gila River. But this year, it did get across. Humidity levels during the day are at about 2 to 3 percent. Normally, during summer you'd see 5 to 12 percent.

Officials closed the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument on Thursday due to smoke generated from the fire. The National Park Service said the closure would remain in effect until conditions improve.

The blaze is 5 percent contained, but fire managers expect that to jump as crews bolstered lines on the northern end. Scars from previous burns were also helping to slow the flames on the southeastern flank.

Firefighters are continuing with burnout operations and have been helped with a slight rise in humidity and decreased winds.

Another reason states in the West will see more massive fires this season is because, coupled with drought and dry climate, crews have experienced changes in firefighting strategies and agencies have changed some policies in fighting wildfires in isolated areas.

In the last 20 years or so, agencies have generally been reluctant to put firefighters at risk in remote areas. It wasn't like that decades ago. Regardless, the number of New Mexico Workers Compensation Insurance Quotes have risen since the fires started.

Instead, agencies have focused attention on burnout operations until conditions are safe to begin containment.

Not that those practices and the large fires are bad things. For example, the Gila Wilderness has been a target for controlled burns.

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