For more than 20 years the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) has been monitoring dozens of indices of drought around the country, including satellite measurements of evaporation and color in vegetation, soil-moisture sensors, rainfall estimates, and river and streamflow levels. Although the agency's weekly assessments have identified periods of exceptional drought before, lately dryness has been ramping up. “The changing climate is definitely contributing to more natural disasters, drought being one of them,” says Brian Fuchs, a climatologist who oversees the weekly report at the NDMC. “We're seeing more frequent and high-intensity episodes. This year some of these areas in the West have been in drought more than they have been without drought.”
Credit: Cédric Scherer and Georgios Karamanis; Source: U.S. Drought Monitor, jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (data)
This article was originally published with the title "Escalating Drought" in Scientific American 325, 5, 74 (November 2021)
Clara Moskowitzis Scientific American's senior editor covering space and physics. She has a bachelor's degree in astronomy and physics from Wesleyan University and a graduate degree in science journalism from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Follow Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz Credit: Nick Higgins
Cédric Scherer is a computational ecologist based in Berlin, Germany, and works as an independent data visualization designer and consultant. Follow Cédric Scherer on Twitter
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