Richard Seager

TL;DR: There is a broad consensus among climate models that this region will dry in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate should already be under way, and the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought or the Dust Bowl and the 1950s droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.

TL;DR: This paper showed that there is a broad consensus among climate models that this region will dry in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate should already be under way.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors derived a forest drought-stress index (FDSI) for the southwestern United States using a comprehensive tree-ring data set representing AD 1000-2007, which is approximately equally influenced by the warm-season vapour-pressure deficit (largely controlled by temperature) and cold-season precipitation, together explaining 82% of the FDSI variability.

TL;DR: It is shown that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend.

TL;DR: A remarkable network of centuries-long annual tree-ring chronologies has now allowed for the reconstruction of past drought over North America covering the past 1000 or more years in most regions as mentioned in this paper.