About the Tool
Climate simulations and scenarios produced for California's Fourth Climate Change Assessment enable investigation of extreme, highly damaging climate changes that are possible but unlikely. One of these low probability, high consequence events is extreme drought.
To explore extreme drought in a warmer future, two 20-year drought scenarios were produced from the LOCA downscaled meteorological and hydrological simulations (Pierce et al, 2018). The first scenario covers the later part of this century from 2051-2070 and was derived from LOCA downscaled HadGEM2-ES RCP 8.5 simulation. The second scenario covers the earlier part of this century from 2023-2042. The precipitation during this scenario is daily LOCA downscaled precipitation in the sequence that it occurred from 2051-2070. However, the maximum and minimum temperatures are an adjusted version of 2051-2070 scenario that takes into account climate warming over the century.
A more detailed description about the drought scenarios is available in the technical Report on Climate, Drought, and Sea Level Rise Scenarios prepared for California's Fourth Climate Change Assessment.
Data Sources
The following list of datasets were used to create this tool. Download data visualized in the charts by clicking the Download Chart button. For more download options follow the links below.