Drought conditions can have devastating impacts in Euroasy regions such as karapinar in Türkiye
Yasin Akgul/AFP through Getty Images
Around the last two decades, the strips of Eurasia, from the barn of Ukraine to the cities of northern China, have seen an increase in extreme heat waves followed by droughts. A tree ring record that extends almost three centuries suggests that the change in human cause change is to blame for the increase in these disastrous compound events.
This pattern can be so harmful because the heat and drought feed together: the high temperatures dry the soil and the drought then deprives moisture to cool things to the next heat wave. This vicious circle has devastating impacts, from low agricultural yields to a higher risk of forest fires.
While parts of Eurasia have seen this heat heat pattern before, “the current trend is beyond naturalness,” says Hans Linderholm at the University of Gototemburg in Sweden.
The complete image was only clear after Linderholm and his colleagues gathered records of tree rings, which retained temperature and precipitation conditions since 1741, from all over Eurasia. They used this to rebuild the large -scale distribution of high and low pressure systems that naturally boost wet and dry conditions through the continent.
The researchers found a particular scenario in this region, which they call the “Trans-Eurasia Heat Wave Wave” has been significantly intensified since 2000, with the size of heat and precipitation anomalies that jump up. The measured. The measured. Those. They link this change with the interruptions in the atmospheric pressure caused by heating in the North Atlantic and greater rain in part of North Africa, which are associated with anthropogenic climate change.
The increase in local temperatures can also directly exacerbate extreme heat and drought. But the new findings of how climate change is also changing relations between distant parts of the atmosphere, known as teleconexions, to interrupt things even more, says Linderholm.
Team projections, based on climatic models, suggest that things will worsen in all the lowest broadcast scenarios. “We see that this new teleconexation pattern has a really different strong trend, that bad things will probably go faster, and there will be more serious impacts,” says Linderholm.
“We have difficulty seeing how [the most affected places are] I’m going to recover, “he says.
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