Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106.
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Mar 22;119(12):e2108124119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2108124119. Epub 2022 Mar 14.
SignificanceTwenty-first century trends in hydroclimate are so large that future average conditions will, in most cases, fall into the range of what we would today consider extreme drought or pluvial states. Using large climate model ensembles, we remove the background trend and find that the risk of droughts and pluvials relative to that (changing) baseline is fairly similar to the 20th century risk. By continually adapting to long-term background changes, these risks could therefore perhaps be minimized. However, increases in the frequency of extremely wet and dry years are still present even after removing the trend, indicating that sustainably managing hydroclimate-driven risks in a warmer world will face increasingly difficult challenges.
二十一世纪的水文气候趋势如此之大，以至于在大多数情况下，未来的平均条件将落入我们今天认为的极端干旱或丰水状态的范围。使用大型气候模型集合，我们消除了背景趋势，发现相对于基线的干旱和丰水的风险与 20 世纪的风险相当相似。通过不断适应长期的背景变化，因此这些风险可能会被最小化。然而，即使在消除趋势后，极湿润和极干燥年份的频率仍在增加，这表明在一个更温暖的世界中可持续地管理由水文气候驱动的风险将面临越来越困难的挑战。
