Is climate change implicated in the 2013–2014 California drought? A hydrologic perspective

Abstract

California has experienced severe drought in 2012–2014 (which appears to be continuing into 2015), with especially low winter precipitation and mountain snowpack in winter 2013–2014. However, the extent to which climate change is implicated in the drought, if at all, is not clear. By applying modeling and statistical approaches, we construct a historical record of California snowpack, runoff, and other hydrological variables of almost 100 years in length and use the reconstructed records to analyze climate trends in the Sierra Nevada and their impact on extreme drought events in the historic record. We confirm a general warming trend and associated decreasing trends in spring snowpack and runoff. We find that the warming may have slightly exacerbated some extreme events (including the 2013–2014 drought and the 1976–1977 drought of record), but the effect is modest; instead, these drought events are mainly the result of variability in precipitation.

The 2010–2015 megadrought in central Chile: impacts on regional hydroclimate and vegetation

“…There is a vast body of literature describing the nature of a recent multiyear (2012)(2013)(2014) drought in California (e.g., Swain, 2015;Williams et al, 2015;Griffin and Anchukaitis, 2014) and its unprecedented effects on hydrology, forest fires and agriculture (e.g., AghaKouchak et al, 2014;Mao et al, 2015). A severe, protracted drought also afflicted southeastern Australia in the recent past (ca.…”

Increased Drought and Pluvial Risk over California due to Changing Oceanic Conditions

“…Mountains at the mid-February 2015 was the lowest since 1951 (Mao et al 2015;Pan et al 35 2003) and below the 10 th percentile at the end of February 2015 ( Figure 1a). These deficits led 36 to reduced groundwater recharge and combined with continued groundwater pumping, 2003 (Famiglietti et al 2011).…”

“…The current drought 23 that has persisted since 2011 has led to a declaration of a drought state of emergency and 24 mandatory curtailment of municipal and agricultural water use (Seager et al 2015). Most of 25 California's precipitation falls in the wintertime and the current drought has been driven by 26 reductions in precipitation over the past winters (Mao et al 2015). The data record (Daly et al 27 2008) shows record-breaking deficits in December 2013 and January 2014 relative to the past 14.…”

Projecting water yield and ecosystem productivity across the United States by linking an ecohydrological model to WRF dynamically downscaled climate data

“…Taking California (mostly in the WRR18) as an example, the monthly Q would decrease by around 5 mm during spring through early summer (the major runoff generation season) due to coupling changes in P and ET. The decrease in flow may cause severe water shortage similar to what happened in 2014-2015 in California (Aghakouchak et al, 2014;Mao et al, 2015). Hydrological changes will bring many impacts on water-related economic sectors.…”