Among them is a worldwide drying out of midcontinental areas during summer, with an increased chance of drought. Enhanced evaporation and higher temperatures would eventually outweigh precipitation increases in those inland areas. In North America, the central and southeast regions will get the hottest and driest, with the West Coast probably less affected because of its heavier rainfall and more moist soil. There is no consensus yet on future trends for El Nino, hurricanes, and midlatitude storms. Scientists have recently embedded fine-scale regional models into global climate models to predict trends in hurricane number, intensity, and track shifts.
Early results show a tendency for a future increase in hurricane intensity.
Scientists expect this technique to yield better estimates in the future as model resolution improves. Some models show slightly warmer El Ninos in the future, but a more consistent result is a trend toward a generally warmer ocean surface in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, says Meehl. Future El Ninos would then be superimposed on a warmer surface, bringing even heavier rainfall to the central and eastern Pacific and lighter rainfall over Southeast Asia than occurred during the 1997 El Nino. But results vary from model to model and the jury is still out on the future of El Nino. Growth in both population and wealth, along with demographic shifts to storm-prone areas, has made the United States more vulnerable to weather assaults.