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The report, "Causes and Predictability of the 2011-14 California Drought," was released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
The study compares drought observations with 160 climate model simulations to tease out the most important factors controlling the drought. The researchers plan to submit the work to the Journal of Climate, Seager said.
"There is no question global warming continues to unfold," said Marty Hoerling, study co-author and a researcher with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. "The three-year drought is not related to the overall warming, but [droughts in California] are something that happens time and time again."
In the new study, scientists determined that the high-pressure system, dubbed the "ridiculously resilient ridge" by a California forecaster, continued through the 2013-2014 winter because of these favorable ocean temperatures. The pool of warm water generates atmospheric winds that form patterns of high and low pressure (called planetary waves) that can get stuck off western North America as a high-pressure ridge.
The ridge and its accompanying drought are opposite the conditions that climate models predict under global warming, lead study author Richard Seager, a professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, said today
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