Identification

Title

Running dry: The U.S. Southwest's drift into a drier climate state

Abstract

Changes in precipitation have far-reaching consequences on human society and ecosystems as has been demonstrated by recent severe droughts in California and the Oklahoma region. Droughts are beside tropical cyclones the most costly weather and climate related extreme events in the U.S. We apply a weather type (WT) analysis to reanalysis data from 1979-2014 that characterize typical weather conditions over the contiguous United States. This enables us to assign precipitation trends within 1980-2010 to changes in WT frequencies and changes in precipitation intensities. 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, WT frequency changes lead to a significant precipitation decrease of up to −25% related to an increase in anticyclonic conditions in the North East Pacific. This trend is partly counteracted by increasing precipitation intensities.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7mw2jrx

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-02-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact