Climate security

Climate Change Altering Droughts, Impacts Across U.S.

As a major drought devastated the West and Midwest beginning in 2012, farmers racked up billions of dollars in crop losses and water managers grappled with possible water shortages for millions of people as reservoirs dried up in the heat. That drought is now gone. But scientists have found that the dry spell showed unusual wild extremes of wetness and warmth — indicators that climate change may be altering the typical characteristics of drought across the U.S., according to a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.