The DOI matches its Crossref record; 49 of the 50 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Little change in global drought over the past 60 years
Abstract
Drought is expected to increase in frequency and severity in the future as a result of climate change, mainly as a consequence of decreases in regional precipitation but also because of increasing evaporation driven by global warming. Previous assessments of historic changes in drought over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries indicate that this may already be happening globally. In particular, calculations of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) show a decrease in moisture globally since the 1970s with a commensurate increase in the area in drought that is attributed, in part, to global warming. The simplicity of the PDSI, which is calculated from a simple water-balance model forced by monthly precipitation and temperature data, makes it an attractive tool in large-scale drought assessments, but may give biased results in the context of climate change. Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated because the PDSI uses a simplified model of potential evaporation that responds only to changes in temperature and thus responds incorrectly to global warming in recent decades. More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years. The results have implications for how we interpret the impact of global warming on the hydrological cycle and its extremes, and may help to explain why palaeoclimate drought reconstructions based on tree-ring data diverge from the PDSI-based drought record in recent years.
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“Two recent studies published in Nature Climate Change 25 and Nature 26 came to opposing conclusions about whether there are noticeable changes in drought trends as a result of climate change.”
From A Big Data Guide to Understanding Climate Change: The Case for Theory-Guided Data Science (2014) · cites this paper as [26]
Citations
Cites
Climate change 2007: the physical science basis
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Thornthwaite, C. W. (1948) · Geographical Review · doi:10.2307/210739 · Cited by 9,334
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Penman, H. L. (1948) · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A Mathematical and Physical Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspa.1948.0037 · Cited by 7,346
Huffman, G. J., Bolvin, D. T., Nelkin, E. J., Wolff, D. B., Adler, R. F., Gu, G., Hong, Y. E., Bowman, K. P., & Stocker, E. F. (2007) · Journal of Hydrometeorology · doi:10.1175/jhm560.1 · Cited by 6,773
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Research works printed but not linked: 1
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Influence of extreme weather disasters on global crop production
Lesk, C., Rowhani, P., & Ramankutty, N. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature16467 · Cited by 3,883
Global warming and changes in drought
Trenberth, K. E., Dai, A., van der Schrier, G., Jones, P. D., Barichivich, J., Briffa, K. R., & Sheffield, J. (2014) · Nature Climate Change · doi:10.1038/nclimate2067 · Cited by 3,382
Self-citationAllen, C. D., Breshears, D. D., & McDowell, N. G. (2015) · Ecosphere · doi:10.1890/es15-00203.1 · Cited by 2,679
“Globally, the impacts of drought or heat-related tree mortality are inherently limited because, overall, drought is relatively infrequent and localized, and there is evidence of little change in global drought since 1950 (Sheffield et al. 2012).”
BackgroundClimate-induced variations in global wildfire danger from 1979 to 2013
Jolly, W. M., Cochrane, M. A., Freeborn, P. H., Holden, Z. A., Brown, T. J., Williamson, G. J., & Bowman, D. M. J. S. (2015) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/ncomms8537 · Cited by 2,200
Beguería, S., Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Reig, F., & Latorre, B. (2014) · International Journal of Climatology · doi:10.1002/joc.3887 · Cited by 2,128
“Based on the PDSI, Dai (2011, 2013) and Van Der Schrier et al. (2011) reported that the specific formulation of the ET0 equation had little effect on the magnitude of global drought, but Sheffield et al. (2012) used the same index and found substantial differences based on different data.”
BackgroundMethodInfluential
Metadata
- Authors
- Sheffield, J., Wood, E. F., & Roderick, M. L.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- Australian National University (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Sheffield, Justin
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2012-11
- Volume
- 491
- Issue
- 7424
- Pages
- 435-438
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W2015522309
- Cited by
- 1,978
- References
- 50
- Citations by year
- 2026: 97 · 2025: 126 · 2024: 131 · 2023: 162 · 2022: 188 · 2021: 196 · 2020: 174 · 2019: 159 · 2018: 160 · 2017: 139 · 2016: 144 · 2015: 121 · 2014: 110 · 2013: 66 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 79.51
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) (submittedVersion)
- ANU Open Research (Australian National University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Hydrology and Drought Analysis
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Climate variability and models
- Keywords
- global drought, Palmer Drought Severity Index, drought trends, potential evaporation, global warming, water cycle, drought indices, climate change impacts, water balance modeling
- MeSH terms
- Models, Theoretical, Temperature, Time Factors, Droughts, Global Warming
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