Manmade warming has increased the prevalence and severity of concurrent drought and heat events, also termed hot droughts, across Western North America in the 20th-21st century, a new report shows.
The authors of the report developed the Western North American Temperature Atlas, a 0.5° C gridded reconstruction of summer maximum temperatures back to the 16th century, to measure the changes.
“Our evaluation of the WNATA with existing hydroclimate reconstructions reveals an increasing association between maximum temperature and drought severity in recent decades, relative to the past five centuries,” the report out this week in the journal of Science Ad