Assessing Impacts of Human-Induced Climate Change on California's Meteorological Drought

Abstract:

Many studies have shown that the atmosphere has warmed because of human activities including increased anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, the impacts of anthropogenic CO2 emissions on meteorological droughts and precipitation patterns are not well understood. In this study, we used historical runs of CMIP5 simulations under pre-industrial and industrial forcings. The two forcings represent rainfall, excluding and including anthropogenic CO2 emissions, respectively. The pre-industrial and current climate simulations are analyzed and compared using a series of techniques including entropy and Wavelet transform. The latter, widely used in signal processing, can detect hidden signal frequencies that cannot be retrieved from the original data. This presentation summarizes our findings and offers prospects for future research.