From Brigham Young University:
Tree rings reveal nightmare droughts in the West
If you think the 1930s drought that caused The Dust Bowl was rough, new research looking at tree rings in the Rocky Mountains has news for you: Things can get much worse in the West.
In fact the worst drought of this century barely makes the top 10 of a study that extended Utah’s climate record back to the year 1429.
With sandpaper and microscopes, Brigham Young University professor Matthew Bekker analyzed rings from drought-sensitive tree species. He found several types of scenarios that could make life uncomfortable in what is now the nation’s third-fastest-growing state:
– Long droughts: The year 1703 kicked off 16 years in a row with below average stream flow.
– Intense droughts: The Weber River flowed at just 13 percent of normal in 1580 and dropped below 20 percent in three other periods.
– Consecutive worst-case scenarios: The most severe drought in the record began in 1492, and four of the five worst droughts all happened during Christopher Columbus’ lifetime.
“We’re conservatively estimating the severity of these droughts that hit before the modern record, and we still see some that are kind of scary if they were to happen again,” said Bekker, a geography professor at BYU. “We would really have to change the way we do things here.”
Modern climate and stream flow records only go back about 100 years in this part of the country, so scientists like Bekker turn to Mother Nature’s own record-keeping to see the bigger picture. For this study, the BYU geographer took sample cores from Douglas fir and pinyon pine trees. The thickness of annual growth rings for these species is especially sensitive to water supply.
Using samples from both living and dead trees in the Weber River basin, the researchers built a tree-ring chronology that extends back 585 years into Utah’s natural history. Modern stream flow measurements helped them calibrate the correlation between ring thickness and drought severity.
As Bekker and his co-authors report in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, the west’s climate usually fluctuates far more than it did in the 1900s. The five previous centuries each saw more years of extremely dry and extremely wet climate conditions.
“We’re trying to work with water managers to show the different flavors of droughts this region has had,” said Bekker. “These are scenarios you need to build into your models to know how to plan for the future.”
Bekker collaborated with researchers from the U.S. Forest Service, Columbia University and Utah State University. The team is currently working on a climate reconstruction based on tree rings that date back more than 1,000 years.
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the west’s climate usually fluctuates far more than it did in the 1900s
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I know…..tree rings
but at least it’s a start
I’m going to need a fainting couch & some reparations (cash only, please), or my blonde haired, blue-eyed Cherokee ancestors’s ghosts are gonna haunt all y’all. –Something Elizabeth Warren very likely said
As Bekker and his co-authors report in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, the west’s climate usually fluctuates far more than it did in the 1900s. The five previous centuries each saw more years of extremely dry and extremely wet climate conditions.
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So much for the weather growing more extreme due to rising CO2 levels.
It’s worse than we thought! AGW causes droughts to time travel backwards!
/sarc
Please check the name of the University. It should be Brigham Young, not Bringham Young.
Well, at least looking at tree rings for signs of past water availability makes sense, unlike looking at tree rings for trace gases and as treemometers.
mmmmm… bring ham
On the surface this sounds like a great analysis of specifically localized weather patterns, with no tie-in to AGW or temperature. the time frame given was prior to industrialization so humans can’t be to blame, right?
Or am I missing something?
There is a good reason why the first peoples in the great plains were nomadic.
The Jamestown colony in Virginia suffered & almost failed from, among other reasons, prolonged drought, 1607-12:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25616853?uid=3739856&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103956586937
Wonder which “environmental scientist” at the University of Virginia blamed human activity for the LIA & its extreme WX. Too bad Mann’s emails aren’t available:
http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Little_Ice_Age_and_Colonial_Virginia_The#start_entry
The Little Ice Age and Colonial Virginia
Contributed by Brendan Wolfe
The Little Ice Age was a climatic period, lasting from about 1300 to 1750, when worldwide temperatures cooled slightly, leading to extreme weather that, in turn, affected the colonizing ventures of Europeans in America. Before their arrival, Europeans assumed America’s climate would match that of lands situated along the same lines of latitude elsewhere. Instead, the New World was both hotter and colder than they expected. And as a result of the Little Ice Age, the weather was marked by wet springs that led to flooding, hot summers that led to long droughts, and particularly cold winters. Scientists disagree over the causes of the Little Ice Age, although an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia has pointed the finger at human activity. Regardless, scientists agree that the effect on weather was pronounced. In January 1607, a massive flood struck southwestern England even as the Thames River was frozen over. Both the areas around Roanoke and Jamestown were suffering from millennial droughts when the colonists arrived demanding food from local Indian populations. The resulting scarcity of food contributed to disease and conflict, both of which ended the venture at Roanoke and threatened the survival of Jamestown.
None of this is new and no I am not tired of saying it, although I imagine some are tired of hearing it. It illustrates again how much the IPCC set back climatology.
It was A E Douglass who first studied tree rings in the American west and related them to sunspots and to droughts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._E._Douglass
In trying to determine State claims to water in the Colorado River the US Supreme Court used a study of tree ring data to determine precipitation and thereby river flow. The study was done by dendroclimatologist Gordon Jacoby who appeared in a 1974 documentary titled “Where did the Colorado Go?” explaining what he did.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1426853/
On the basis of these findings they apparently apportioned water to each State that turned out to exceed actual annual flow by 10 percent. As I understand Mexico didn’t get their portion.
This research and documentation in a central DB is invaluable in providing rapid rejection of the next big scare to be attempted by the amoral warmist press. Thanks
Nothing wrong with using tree rings if done properly. And for the right reasons. And in the correct context.
There is a reason that you cannot mistake the swamps and foliage of Georgia, South Carolina and Florida for the deserts of the US Southwest. How could the West not have had much more dry climate than the rest of the US for many, many centuries. That is why all the alarmism of droughts of the West makes no sense.
Why didn’t they go back farther? A study in Earth Sciences Review back in 2005 (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/stgeorge/geog5426/Cook%20Earth%20Science%20Reviews%202007.pdf) shows 2 droughts in the west of 200 years duration EACH between about 800 and 1300 AD. The conclusions in section 10 state:
“These reconstructions, many of which cover the past 1000 yr, have revealed the occurrence of a number of unprecedented megadroughts over the past millennium that clearly exceed any found in the instrumental records since about AD 1850, including an epoch of significantly elevated aridity that persisted for almost 400 yr over the AD 900–1300 period. In terms of duration, these past megadroughts dwarf the famous droughts of the 20th century, such as the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s, the southern Great Plains drought of the 1950s, and the current one in the West that began in 1999 and still lingers on as of this writing in 2005.”
The current California drought is nothing compared with what has happened in the past and will likely happen again someday.
Must be some pretty clueless reviewers that allowed this trash to be published. Everyone knows that tree rings are a proxy for *temperature*.
/sarc
I recall this sort of drought history being discussed in the late 1960’s. Drought periods of over 50 years were discovered in the same region. It seems as if modern paleo work is allowing for finer resolution of the drought periods. this information gives some perspective on the climate obsessed’s compulsion to claim every notable weather event is somehow unprecedented and due to CO2.
Pfft, not like the Cult of Global Warming must pay heed to these findings. It will be as if this study, like all of the other hundreds of real climate research papers, was never published.
In the early 1800’s the Great Plains were often referred to as the Great American Desert by cartographers and travelers alike. By the time large scale emigration started, climate had moved from the LIA into a bit wetter mode. There are many observations from early settlers that spoke of sufficient rain and the Term GAD disappeared from maps and minds.
Best
Doug
“Scientists disagree over the causes of the Little Ice Age, although an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia has pointed the finger at human activity.”
You know, if you slack up on offering the Sacrifices, these kinds of things happen every time.
I think this is the big give away.
Prairie grass.
Do not plough up a drought resistant plant that can flower in a drought and replace with non drought resistant crops.
Bison, hardy animal also good at surviving droughts.
No more grant money for you, buddy.
Hold on just a minute . . .
Those rings are supposed to teach us all about temperature, don’t ya know, not moisture.
Surely we’re not going to suggest that tree growth is influenced by multiple factors. 🙂
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Seriously, though, it is good to get an occasional long-term view to remind us that perhaps what we currently see isn’t quite as “unprecedented” as some would have us believe.
Yea, Bison were good at surviving anything but man.