Large-Scale Controls on Drought World-Wide

Abstract:

Drought occurs on a wide range of time and space scales with some regions of the world primarily impacted by short term (order one month or less) but extremely intense droughts and heat waves, while others have droughts lasting one season but rarely longer, while still others experience prolonged multi-year droughts. This talk will address the large-scale controls of drought with a focus on the role of SST forcing and other factors driving drought and heat waves in different regions of the world. Issues to be discussed include the seasonality and other temporal changes in the forcing, as well as, the role of unforced internal atmospheric variability. The results are based on various observations, reanalyses and a suite of atmospheric model simulations.