New scientific models of the way the climate in the United States will evolve over the course of the next four decades show that Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah will be most affected by increasing heat waves, which will boost the average temperatures up by a significant amount. The computer model also reveals the fact that weather anomalies, such as extremely high temperatures over one in 50 summers, will became far more common, with the most affected areas at risk of experiencing them even eight times per decade. The simulation has the highest resolution of such an investigation.
In charge of elaborating the new model was a team of researchers from the Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, led by climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh. He designed the simulation in such a way that it would unfold in ten-year periods between 2000 and 2039, and have a 25-square-kilometer area as the smallest unit. This means that the country's entire territory was divided into squares, and thus the researchers got the most complex simulation of climate change in the US to date.
“The once-in-50-years event becomes the five-times-in-ten-year event, and in the western United States it is much higher than that – up to eight times per decade,” he says, quoted by
Nature News. In its Fourth Assessment Report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the warming in the US, and especially in its Western regions, wouldn't be that significant, but the new paper, which uses far better prediction techniques, shows that the threat was underestimated.
“If humans and ecological systems have adapted to the current climate and if they experience temperatures they have never before experienced, it may be a problem for some systems. But Diffenbaugh doesn't say which ones,” Rutgers University climate scientist Alan Robock explains. “In terms of the targets that are necessary to avoid dangerous climate change, these results suggest that we may need a re-evaluation of those targets,” the Purdue University expert believes.
All it takes for the scenario to come true, the researcher adds, is for the global temperature to increase by an average of 1.2ºC, as opposed to the 2000 means. The effects of such a warming phenomenon could be devastating on the atmosphere, the rain patterns, mountaintop glaciers and polar ice sheets, the researchers warn.
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