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Decadal Drought Variability Over North America: Mechanisms and Predictability

  • Decadal Predictability and Prediction (T Delworth, Section Editor)
  • Published:
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Abstract

The physical mechanisms and potential predictability of North American drought on decadal timescales are reviewed in a simple and straightforward manner amenable to a wide audience. During decadal droughts, the tropical oceans, most notably cold states of the Pacific but also warm states of the Atlantic, provide forcing that continually nudges the atmosphere toward circulation anomalies that favor high pressure over southern North America and dry conditions. However, even in these regions, and even more so in the northwest and northeast, the oceans exert less than dominant control and actual drought onset, evolution and termination can deviate due, presumably, to potent internal atmosphere variability. The ocean influence, however, justifies efforts to determine if the driving sea surface temperature anomalies in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic are predictable beyond the seasonal to interannual timescale. Evidence to date, based on initialized predictions with coupled models, is tantalizingly suggestive that useful predictability on these timescales may exist within the atmosphere-ocean system although relevance to North American decadal drought has not yet been demonstrated. These recent advances in drought science and prediction warrant continued research aimed at developing useful long term predictions of drought that can guide adaptation and minimize the associated widespread social and economic disruptions.

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Notes

  1. Sixteen member ensembles with later versions of the NCAR model up to the current CAM5.3 have been generated at Lamont. These models show similar behavior to CCM3 but the older model is chosen here due to a modestly better agreement between observations and model for precipitation history of the southwest. The observed precipitation values occasionally lie outside the two standard deviation spread of the model ensemble which could be because the 16 members are insufficient to capture the full range of model internal variability.

  2. Cook et al. [10] show calibration and verification statistics for the NADA revealing quite uniform skill across North America despite variations in density of tree ring records.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Jennifer Nakamura and Cuihua Li for preparing figures and Naomi Henderson and Dong-Eun Lee for performing the model integrations. This work was supported by NOAA awards NA14OAR4310232 and NA14OAR4310223 and NSF awards AGS1243204 and AGS1401400. LDEO contribution number 8098.

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  1. Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, 61 Route 9W., Palisades, NY, 10964, USA

    Richard Seager & Mingfang Ting

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Correspondence to Richard Seager.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Decadal Predictability and Prediction

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Seager, R., Ting, M. Decadal Drought Variability Over North America: Mechanisms and Predictability. Curr Clim Change Rep 3, 141–149 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-017-0062-1

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