Drought conditions may have devastating influences on Eurasian regions such as carapinar in Turkey
Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images
Over the past two decades, cuts of Eurasia – from Ukraine’s bread basket to cities in northern China – have seen an increase in extreme heat waves followed by drought. A wooden record that extends almost three centuries back, suggests that climate change in human cunning is black for the increase in these disastrous composite events.
This pattern can be particularly destructive of how heat and drug is fed of each other: High templaries dry out soil, and the drought then deprives Moost to cool things down during the next waving. This vicious cycle has devastating effects, from low agricultural yields to high fire risk.
While parts of Eurasia have this heat wave pattern before, “the current trend is just far beyond the natural variation,” says Hans Linderholm at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The full picture only became clear after Linderholm and his colleagues gathered wooden ring records, which preserved temperature and rainfall conditions since 1741 from all over Eurasia. They used this to rebuild the large distribution of tall and low pressure systems that naturally drive wet and dry conditions throughout the continent.
The researchers found a particular scenario in this region, which they call the “Trans-Eurasian heatwave Tarproof”, has been significantly intensified since 2000, with the size of heat and precipitation anomalies skipping those measured at any other time in the post. They associate this changes in disturbances in atmospheric press caused by heating in the northern Atlantic and increased rain in part of northern Africa – both of which are associated with anthropogenic climate change.
Rising local temperatures can also directly aggravate extreme heat and drught. But the new finding shows how climate change also changes relationships between distant parts of the atmosphere – known as Telecons – to disrupt things even more, says Linderholm.
The team’s projections, which are based on climate models, suggest that things get worse below all except the lowest emission scenarios. “We see that this new telecommunications pattern has a really clearly strong trend, which means that things are likely to go faster and there will be more serious effects,” says Linderholm.
“We have a hard time seeing how [the most affected places are] Will recover, ”he says.