Seasonal summer rains have done little to offset drought conditions gripping the western United States, with California and Nevada seeing record July heat and moderate-to-exceptional drought according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Now, new NASA research is showing how drought in the region is expected to change in the future, providing stakeholders with crucial information for decision making.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal, Earth’s Future, was led by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and funded by NOAA’s Climate Program Office and NASA’s Modeling, Analysis and Prediction (MAP) Program. It found that the western United States is headed for prolonged drought conditions whether greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb or are aggressively reined in.
To understand the southwest’s vulnerability and tendency towards drought and the factors that contribute to it, the team selected the severe single-year drought of 2002 and the extended drought of 2000 to 2020 as examples of acute and prolonged droughts respectively. They then looked at how common these acute and prolonged droughts were, not only during the period of instrumental records, but also using reconstructed drought conditions stretching back more than a thousand years and state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations of the future.