Southwest America should Consider Current Drought as Normal, Study suggests

A new study published Thursday has warned that the American Southwest should be prepared for more frequent droughts as a series of storm patterns linked to precipitation has been found becoming increasingly rare.

For the government-funded study, researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, analyzed data collected over 35 years, from 1979 to 2014. Broad storm patterns associated with wet weather were also indentified by the researchers.

As per the researchers, they found that the three of the patterns most connected to precipitation were becoming increasingly rare. It proves that the Southwest is moving into a drier climate, the study published in Geophysical Research Letters concluded. The study also said that today’s drier conditions are normal for the Southwest.

In a press release, the lead author of the study announced, “A normal year in the Southwest is now drier than it once was. If you have a drought nowadays, it will be more severe because our base state is drier”.

But some experts think the data collected over 35 years isn’t enough to consider that the Southwest’s shift to drier climates is abnormal.

California has been facing droughts from a long time. The state can be considered as a good example to study severe drought conditions. In a report by The New York Times last year, scientists said that California's history shows that the state has faced droughts that lasted for many years, or can say decades. In two cases in last more than a thousand years, droughts lasted for more than two centuries.

One researcher stated in the April report that the last 150 years could be considered as normal. But, when a time, not so far, is considered, it can be concluded that droughts can lead to much drier decades and centuries, the researcher said.