Distinguishing warming-induced drought from drought-induced warming

Abstract:

It is usually observed that temperatures, especially maximum temperatures are higher during drought. A very widely held public perception is that the increase in temperature is a cause of drought. This represents the warming-induced drought scenario. However, the agricultural and hydrologic scientific communities have a very different interpretation with drought being the cause of increasing temperature. In essence, those communities assume the warming is a surface feedback and their interpretation is for drought-induced warming. This is a classic cause-effect problem that has resisted definitive explanation due to the lack of radiative observations at suitable spatial and temporal scales.

In this presentation we first summarise the observations and then use theory to untangle the cause-effect relationships that underlie the competing interpretations. We then show how satellite data (CERES, NASA) can be used to disentangle the cause-effect relations.