A new study warns that droughts in the coming decades could be more prolonged than projected by current climate models. The international team of scientists examined potential biases that could skew climate models used under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) midrange and high emissions scenarios. The researchers corrected for the bias by calibrating those models with observations of the most extended annual dry spells between 1998 and 2018.
By the end of this century, they found that the average longest periods of drought could be ten days longer than previously projected. Our study pinpoints global regions where current climate model projections of drought increases may be underestimated,” said the lead author, a hydrological extremes researcher at Ghent University in Belgium. The study identified that parts of the southern U.S. and northern Mexico, particularly, could see droughts five days longer than projected by 2040, nearly 60 years earlier than anticipated.
Conversely, in central East Asia, dry intervals between rainstorms decreased four times greater than suggested by non-calibrated models under both IPCC emissions scenarios. The finding that droughts could be longer than projected by the IPCC fits a pattern of recent research showing that various climate impacts are accelerating, could be worse than expected, and arrive sooner than projected by the panel.
Calibrating climate models for droughts
Its reports are issued every five to seven years and represent a scientific consensus that politics can dilute. With many signs pointing to danger ahead, the new study’s findings emphasize the need for a reassessment of global drought risks and highlight the importance of correcting existing biases in climate models to increase confidence in their projections. The scientists wrote that “systematic biases contribute to divergence in model projections of dry extremes.”
Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said there is ample evidence that climate models fail to resolve some of the processes involved in summer season extremes, including floods, heatwaves, and droughts.
We argue that the models are underestimating the impact that climate change is already having on these extreme events,” said Mann, who was not involved in the new research. In recent years, simultaneous extremes have been evident at global and regional scales during every season, over land, and across the oceans. During the last few days in Europe, multiple forest fires erupted in Portugal after summer heatwaves and drought, while at the same time, parts of Poland, Czechia, Romania, and Austria went from the hottest summer ever measured to an extreme extended rainstorm with deadly flooding in a matter of days.
The catastrophic rainfall that hit Central Europe is precisely what scientists expect with climate change,” said a researcher at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London who is part of a team assessing the role of global warming in the floods. A warmer atmosphere heated by fossil fuel emissions can hold more moisture, leading to heavier downpours,” she said. As long as the world burns oil, gas, and coal,” she added, “heavy rainfall and other weather extremes will intensify, making our planet a more dangerous and expensive place to live.
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