Megadrought?

While the snow continue to remain conspicuously absent in the West, we’ve heard and read a lot about "megadrought" in recent days, without being sure what it meant and what it could compared to, so I have done some research and found that it represents a period of 20 to 30 years where conditions are drier than average. 

There may be some wet years in between, but condition remain in a drought situation through that particular period. We aren’t talking about the droughts we typically hear that only last a few months or a couple of years. 

So the big news is that new findings from research conducted at UCLA have found that the last 22 years are now the driest out of the last 1,200 years in the Western U.S. That kind of statistic has earned the last two decades the classification of "megadrought", and is also suggesting that it is exacerbated by humanity’s heating of the planet. 

The researchers found the current drought wouldn’t be nearly as severe without global warming and estimated that 42% of the drought’s severity is attributable to higher temperatures caused by greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. 

In their research, the scientists examined major droughts in southwestern North America back to the year 800 and determined that the region’s desiccation so far this century has surpassed the severity of a megadrought in the late 1500s. 

The authors of the study also concluded that dry conditions will likely continue through this year and, judging from the past, may persist for years, so let’s not get our hopes to high about deep powder for the near future!