Abstract
Spatially compounding extremes pose substantial threats to globally interconnected socio-economic systems. Here we use multiple large ensemble simulations of the high-emissions scenario to show increased risk of compound droughts during the boreal summer over ten global regions. Relative to the late twentieth century, the probability of compound droughts increases by ~40% and ~60% by the middle and late twenty-first century, respectively, with a disproportionate increase in risk across North America and the Amazon. These changes contribute to an approximately ninefold increase in agricultural area and population exposure to severe compound droughts with continued fossil-fuel dependence. ENSO is the predominant large-scale driver of compound droughts with 68% of historical events occurring during El Niño or La Niña conditions. With ENSO teleconnections remaining largely stationary in the future, a ~22% increase in frequency of ENSO events combined with projected warming drives the elevated risk of compound droughts.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 163-170 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Nature Climate Change |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2022 |
Funding
We would like to thank the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Climate Hazards Center UC Santa Barbara and US CLIVAR Working Group on Large Ensembles for archiving and enabling public access to their data. We thank Washington State University for the startup funding that has supported J.S. and D.S. W.B.A. acknowledges funding from Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship. M.A. was supported by the US Air Force Numerical Weather Modeling Program and the National Climate‐Computing Research Center, which is located within the National Center for Computational Sciences at the ORNL and supported under a Strategic Partnership Project (no. 2316‐T849‐08) between DOE and NOAA. This manuscript has been co-authored by employees of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT Battelle, LLC, under contract no. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes. The US DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).