Changes in Aridity in the Western United States
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Date
2008-08Author
Hidalgo León, Hugo G.
Dettinger, Michael D.
Cayan, Daniel R.
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Show full item recordAbstract
It is often remarked that most of the western US (Figure
1) is “always in drought,” especially by visitors from wetter
climates. The plants and landforms of the West, however, are more or less adapted to the region’s relatively
dry but variable climates, and so important variations in the levels of drought, or aridity, characterize the landscape.
During “real” droughts, broad areas of the West are subjected to drier conditions than normal,
imposing—at least temporarily—arid climatic conditions
on many semiarid and even humid areas. In response to
these climatic conditions, the hydrologic balances between
waters that run off and those that evaporate back
into the atmosphere are transformed temporarily in ways
that color the entire region’s water supplies and vegetation.
In this article, we describe the major changes that
droughts wreak on the “normal” partitioning of precipitation
between evaporation and runoff, as depicted by a
hydrological model that simulates historical variations of
the region’s surface hydrology.
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- Meteorología [501]