Jason E. Smerdon

TL;DR: An empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models are used to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals.

TL;DR: The authors reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia and found that the most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century.

TL;DR: The authors used an empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed.

TL;DR: In this paper, the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) were used to evaluate global drying and wetting trends in the twenty-first century.

TL;DR: The megadrought-like trajectory of 2000–2018 soil moisture was driven by natural variability superimposed on drying due to anthropogenic warming, which pushed an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst SWNA megadroughts since 800 CE.