Kevin J. Anchukaitis

TL;DR: The Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas (MADA), a seasonally resolved gridded spatial reconstruction of Asian monsoon drought and pluvials over the past millennium, derived from a network of tree-ring chronologies, provides a long-term context for recent monsoon variability that is critically needed for climate modeling, prediction, and attribution.

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: This article used two paleoclimate reconstructions of drought and precipitation for Central and Southern California to place this current event in the context of the last millennium and demonstrate that while 3 year periods of persistent below-average soil moisture are not uncommon, the current event is the most severe drought in the last 1200 years, with single year (2014) and accumulated moisture deficits worse than any previous continuous span of dry years.

TL;DR: Hydroclimate variability for this region is strongly and inversely correlated with tropical Pacific sea surface temperature, indicating that a warm Pacific and El Niño events induce drought at interannual and interdecadal time scales, and that low-frequency variations of tropical Pacific climate can exert significant influence over Southeast Asian climate and society.

TL;DR: It is found that intervals of severe drought lasting for periods ranging from decades to centuries are characteristic of the monsoon and are linked to natural variations in Atlantic temperatures, indicating that themonsoon is capable of longer and more severe future droughts.