The current drought, which began in 2000 and continues to this day, is the driest 22-year period this region has seen since 800 CE.
that while the West is naturally prone to swings of dry and wet periods, they can see an overall trend of drying in the area. And if climate change worsens, there’s still room for the droughts to get even more severe. Water managers need to consider that drier conditions might be a new normal, Williams added: “We need to be prepared for a much drier future and to not rely so much on hope that when it gets wet again, we can just go back to business-as-usual water management.
If people in the West don’t feel as though they’re living through a megadrought, it’s due to groundwater and large reservoirs that buffer the system, Williams said, “but we are utilizing those backstops so rapidly right now that we’re at real risk of those backstops not being there for us in 10 or 20 years.”Symptoms of strain from the drought are palpable across the American West. Two of the US’s largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which sit on the Colorado River reachedlast summer.
Other models also show that the west is drying, Samantha Stevenson, a climate modeler at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the study, told. “That’s primarily because of the warming of the land surface, with some contribution from precipitation chances as well,” she said. “We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years.
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