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Climate science

The challenge of hot drought

Nature volume 503, pages 350–351 (2013)Cite this article

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An analysis of North American drought variability over the past millennium shows that it is not unusual for widespread drought to persist for years, prompting fresh thinking about our ability to deal with such climate conditions.

Drought is heating up around the warming world. Particularly hot drought has cost more than US$40 billion and claimed 218 human lives since 2010 in the United States alone1. These hot and dry conditions have also contributed to unusually widespread and devastating wildfires1, fuelled by wide expanses of weakened and dead trees that were unable to deal with heat stress and subsequent insect attack2. Yet, to get a real sense of how this recent change in drought severity might shape the future, one has to look to the past. An analysis of regional and pan-continental North American drought over the past 1,000 years, reported by Cook et al.3 in the Journal of Climate, makes it clear that recent droughts, as costly as they have been, are only a taste of what might lie ahead, independently of any big climate change.

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Figure 1: The 2012 North American drought.

MAP: BENJAMIN COOK; DATA SOURCE: CLIMATIC RESEARCH UNIT/UNIV. EAST ANGLIA

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jonathan T. Overpeck is at the Institute of the Environment and in the Departments of Geosciences and of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.,

    Jonathan T. Overpeck

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  1. Jonathan T. Overpeck
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Correspondence to Jonathan T. Overpeck.

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Overpeck, J. The challenge of hot drought. Nature 503, 350–351 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/503350a

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