Global Drought

You’ll recall in my last post I noted that the US shows no evidence of increasing drought. It is fair to suggest that the story may be different elsewhere (although not relevant for the EPA for instance). It just so happens that a study that examined global soil moisture was recently published. Here is the reference:

Sheffield, J., K.M. Andreadis, E.F. Wood, and D.P. Lettenmaier. 2009. Global and Continental Drought in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: Severity–Area–Duration Analysis and Temporal Variability of Large-Scale Events. Journal of Climate, 22, 1962-1981.

This has just gotten noticed at WCR. As you can see, the last fifty years have not seen more drought.

I’m also trying to download the paper but for some reason the pdf is not opening…