Drush conditions can have a destructive effect on Eurasian regions, comparable to Karapinar in Turkey
Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images
Over the past 20 years, Eurasia’s swaths – from Ukraine’s bread trolley to town in northern China – saw a jump in extreme heat waves, followed by drought. The Record of the Tree Ring extending for nearly three centuries suggests that man’s climate change is guilty for the rise in these catastrophic complex events.
This pattern could be particularly harmful resulting from how heat and drought feed to one another: high temperatures will dry the soil, and then drought deprives it of moisture to chill in the course of the next heat wave. This vicious cycle has destructive effects, from lower agricultural crops to the next risk of fireplace.
While in the Eurasia part they saw this pattern with a heat wave, “the current trend is simply beyond natural variability,” he says Hans Linderholm on the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The full picture became clear only after Linderholm and his colleagues gathered the records of the tree ring which have retained the temperature and precipitation conditions from 1741, from throughout Eurasia. They used this to reconstruct the distribution of high -scale high and low pressure systems, which naturally drives wet and dry conditions on the continent.
Scientists have found a special scenario in this region, which they call “Trans-Eurasian Strave-Fave-Fave”, has intensified significantly since 2000, with the scale of warmth anomalies and rainfall exceeding those measured at some other time in records. They mix this alteration with the interference of atmospheric pressure attributable to heating in the North Atlantic and increased rainfall in North Africa – each are related to anthropogenic climate change.
Increasing local temperatures may also directly exacerbate extreme heat and drought. But the brand new discovery shows how climate change also changes the connection between distant parts of the atmosphere – called as teleconnections – in order to disturb things much more, says Linderholm.
The team’s forecasts, based on climate models, suggest that the situation will deteriorate in all except the bottom emission scenarios. “We see that this new teleconference pattern has a really clear strong trend, which means that most likely things will go faster and there will be more serious effects,” says Linderholm.
“We have difficulty seeing how [the most affected places are] I’m going to recuperate – he says.
