Large contribution from anthropogenic warming to an emerging North American megadrought (NCEI Accession 0209529)

This is an archive of the gridded climate, soil moisture, and reconstruction datasets produced for an evaluation of recent observed western North American drought conditions in the context of the past 1200 years and a climate-change attribution approach to evaluate the possible contribution of anthropogenic climate change to recent drought anomalies.

The datasets are gridded spatiotemporal cubes stored as netCDF files as well as text files with annual time series of regionally averaged drought metrics. The gridded climate datasets have 1/8- and 1/4-degree resolution are calibrated versions of multiple data products to allow for full North American coverage for the 1901-2018 period at monthly and daily time scales. The soil-moisture datasets are also gridded at 1/8- and 1/4-degree resolutions, span 1901-2018, and were calculated using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrological model and bucket moisture-balance modeling. The reconstructions are of annualized summer soil moisture at 1/2-degree resolution for western North America. This data archive also contains time series of the 1,521 tree-ring width indices (RWI) used for the reconstructions.

Tags: actinometry, aerology, agriculturalmeteorology, airplaneobservation, airpollution, atmospheric and geospace sciences-1703029, available water capacity, climatology, daily mean heat flux, daily mean sensible heat flux, daily mean snow water equivalent, daily mean soil moisture within 0-40 cm, daily mean soil moisture within 100-200 cm, daily mean soil moisture within 40-100 cm, daily net snow sublimation, daily net total snow melt, daily net total snow sublimation, elevation above sea level, final year of the calibration period, fraction of 1979-2010 monthly mean 0-200 cm soil moisture plus snow water equivalent, fractional effect of prior-month mcdi versus current-month z-index, glaciology, hydrology, june-august self-calibrated palmer drought severity index, landhydrology, landmeteorologyclimate, landpollution, landwaterpollution, latitude, longitude, mean daily 0-10 cm soil moisture, mean daily 0-40 cm soil moisture, mean daily 10-100 cm soil moisture, mean daily 100-200 cm soil moisture, mean daily 40-100 cm soil moisture, mean daily latent heat flux, mean daily maximum temperature, mean daily minimum temperature, mean daily sensible heat flux, mean daily snow melt, mean daily snow water equivalent, mean daily sublimation, mean downward longwave radiation at the surface, mean downward solar radiation at the surface, mean relative humidity, mean saturation vapor pressure, mean surface pressure, mean vapor pressure, mean wind speed, meteorology, month, monthly intercept value used to convert mcdi to smf, monthly mean 0-200 cm soil moisture, monthly mean albedo, monthly mean snow water equivalent, monthly model calibrated drought index, monthly palmer z-index, monthly self-calibrated palmer drought severity index, monthly slope value used to convert mcdi to smf, national science foundation, pollution, precipitation total, ring-width index (rwi) chronologies, satelliteobservation, search radius, self-calibrated palmer drought severity index, spatial smoothing of target dataset, standardized june-august soil-moisture anomaly, synopticmeteorology, time, total penman-monteith reference evapotranspiration, total penman-monteith reference evapotranspiration after adjusting surface resistance for increasing, weatherforecasts, weatherobservations, year
Organization: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce