Data gathered from a study analyzing weather patterns over the last 35 years in the southwestern United States reveals that the region is becoming increasingly drier, according to a report published in USA Today.
Normal standards of rain and snow today in the Southwest is actually one-quarter more arid than it was before the 1970’s detailed in a federally sponsored study published in the journal, Geophysical Research Letters. Essentially, the area’s rain and snowfall accumulation will slowly diminish.
Study lea, Andreas Prein of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said, “This is something we expect from global warming,” and added, “We see that in observations. It’s happening already,” and that “Droughts are occurring there more easily.”
However, Prein advises that new findings don’t conclusively prove that climate change is the primary culprit because researchers haven’t yet focused their research on a connection but will conduct one subsequently.
Evidence supports earlier climate models that have projected a belt of drier high-pressure air originating near the equator will migrate northward covering San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Researchers identified numerous weather cycles from 1979-2014 that are normal and looked for any inconsistencies. Three particular patterns that result in the wettest weather in the Southwest include low-pressure zones in the North Pacific off the coast of Washington, mostly during the winter season.
Katharine Hayhoe, a non-participant climate scientist at Texas Tech, observed,”This study is important as it connects the dots between long-term trends and changes in specific weather patterns that appear to be driving those trends.”