Almost half of the United States is currently experiencing some level of drought, and it is expected to worsen in the upcoming months. According to the experts, the dry conditions could put a strain on water supplies and have important effects on the environment, such as increased susceptibility to fire this summer.
A map is built with data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, which depicts areas of drought in the continental U.S. on March 23, 2021. It is based on measurements of climate, soil, and water conditions from more than 350 federal, state, and local observers around the country. NASA provides experimental measurements and models for this monitoring effort.
It is predicted that the hardest-hit areas are in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico, where severe to exceptional drought developed in 2020 and persisted through winter. According to the recent study published in Nature (14 February 2022), global warming has pushed what would have been a moderate drought in southwestern North America into megadrought territory.
To make their predictions they used a combination of hydrological modeling and tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture
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