30 July - 5 August 2012 - orsam

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When the western Pacific is especially warm and the central Pacific is especially cool — the latter a natural, cyclically occurring condition known as La Niña, which has prevailed since 2010 — the temperature gradient causes changes in atmospheric circulation. Dry air is pushed westward toward the Horn of Africa, which in 2011 experienced a massive drought. There also seems to be an eastward ripple effect, interacting with other weather patterns to produce drought conditions in mid-latitude regions. La Niña generally produces dry spells in southern North America, but adding a warm-to-cool Pacific gradient generates what some scientists call ―the perfect ocean for drought,‖ spreading it far and wide. This occurred between 1998 and 2002, when a similar warm-to-cool Pacific gradient existed and drought struck the United States and mid-latitude regions worldwide. Another, lesser gradient occurred in 2007 and 2008, just before another U.S. drought. The latest warm-to-cool gradient occurred in 2010 and 2011. Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at NOAA‘s Earth System Research Laboratory who coined the ―perfect ocean for drought‖ term, said it may well help explain the current disaster. ―The 2011 drought in Texas was part of the La Niña effect, and we‘ve carried it on here,‖ he said. ―When background conditions in the tropical Atlantic and Indian Ocean are warm, it leads to the worst of all possible worlds for droughts in the mid-latitudes. I can‘t confirm that‘s been driving the conditions we‘ve been seeing, but it‘s an useful first guess.‖ If that dynamic is at work, then fossil fuel pollution is implicated. ―Some part of it is related to extra water vapor that wouldn‘t be there‖ if not for human greenhouse gas emissions, Funk said. ―If we didn‘t have all that extra anthropogenic water vapor, the western Pacific would be cooler, and the gradient wouldn‘t be as great.‖ Bin Guan, a drought specialist at the California Institute of Technology, struck a cautionary note on early interpretations. ―Drought development is a long, complicated process,‖ he said. ―Its response to greenhouse gases is more complicated than temperature alone because it‘s a combination of temperature, precipitation, evaporation, soil moisture, and other conditions.‖ Page 95
Drought severity in the U.S. as of <strong>July</strong> 24, <strong>2012</strong>. Image: Richard Heim, NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC Whether the current drought‘s severity is linked to greenhouse gas pollution is ―difficult to say with certainty,‖ Guan said. ―It could be a combination of both natural forces and human impact, but we can‘t be sure, at least for now.‖ Also fueling the drought was the exception warmth of the past winter and spring, which by drying U.S. soils reduced the amount of moisture entering regional weather systems through evaporation. The extent to which that reflects climate change is unknown, as is the provenance of a high-low pressure system now sitting off the U.S. west coast that funnels warm, dry air from approaching storm systems, said Hoerling. Those factors may prove unrelated to human activity, but represent the type of patterns with which climate change interacts, ultimately producing a world that — regardless of this drought‘s origin — is expected to become a much hotter, drier place. ―We‘re not creating weather patterns we‘ve never Page 96
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30 July - 5 August 2012 - orsam

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