Assistant research professor Cody Routson<\/strong>, assistant professor Nick McKay<\/strong>, Regents professor Darrell Kaufman<\/strong> and postdoctoral scholar Michael Erb<\/strong>, all in the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University, led the study, which used newly compiled data from the Holocene Era (about the last 10,000 years) and compared it to simulations from global climate models.<\/p>\n \u201cFuture changes in drought and aridity will be among the most important impacts of climate change,\u201d Routson said. \u201cOur research suggests that the influence of enhanced Arctic warming will be another influence on drying, pushing vulnerable regions into drier conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n They hypothesized that this phenomenon\u2014that magnified Arctic warming makes the temperature difference between the equator and pole weaker\u2014could affect mid-latitude storm systems, which in turn affects farming and other food production in addition to water availability for population centers in arid and semi-arid regions. However, researchers only have direct observations of global climate change for the past 200 years, which is not long enough to test the hypothesis.<\/p>\n \u201cBy studying the geological evidence of past climate change, we could observe in retrospect how the Earth\u2019s climate system responded the last time the Arctic warmed more than the rest of the planet, like it\u2019s been doing since industrialization,\u201d Kaufman said.<\/p>\n The study asserts that changing Earth\u2019s energy balance affects circulation, storms and aridity.<\/p>\n The question of Arctic warming\u2019s influence on the mid-latitude region came about as a mashup of several scientists\u2019 different projects. Routson studied megadroughts in the Southwest and McKay was studying paleoclimate records throughout the Northern Hemisphere, with a special focus on the Arctic. They noticed a connection between Arctic temperatures and aridity in the mid-latitude region, which is approximately equidistant from the Equator and the North Pole, between 30 degrees north (runs through Houston and New Orleans) and 50 degrees north (runs through Vancouver Island and Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada).<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Over the years, Routson, McKay and Kaufman have worked with a large group of scientists through the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) program compiling hundreds of climate records from various natural archives and creating new ways to synthesize the data. This recent work, which extends back 10,000 years, builds on the\u00a0PAGES 2k project, which developed temperature reconstruction for the past 2,000 years. Having these data collected and able to be analyzed, along with the addition of Erb, allowed for this research to move forward. Erb blended advanced climate models and computational techniques with paleoclimate data to test and expand upon the mechanistic framework the team had created.<\/p>\n