A study was carried out to know how much California drought can be blamed on natural climate variability and global warming shakedown. Study researchers found the percentage to lie between 8 and 27.

Study researchers were able to know the percentage using a model built on historical data. The research provides a hint about how higher temperatures affect California’s atmosphere and drive its droughts.

In many studies, global warming has been largely blamed for changes in the natural climate variations like El Niño and La Niña. Study researchers have found it to be especially true for California. It has been noticed that in the last few years, natural climate precipitations have declined significantly and temperatures have increased alarmingly.

Things become extremely difficult in such condition, where water resources for natural and human systems are already short. Every year, level of global warming is increasing because the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is on rise. Therefore, California’s water balance is increasingly becoming detectable.

With the help of computational soil-moisture accounting approach, the study researchers have quantified the effect of global warming. It was found that around 70% of the California drought severity in 2012-2014 was due to the lack of precipitation and the remaining percentage is due to increased atmospheric evaporative demand that majorly happened due to extreme warm temperatures.

The researchers also calculated the temperature effect on drought due to human-caused global warming and natural temperature variability. It was found that global warming has contributed between 8 and 27% to the severity of 2012-2014 California drought.