Drought-prone pasts may foretell New York’s and Atlanta’s futures

Terra Daily: New York City and Atlanta have both experienced droughts in the past few decades that required them to implement water restrictions and conservation measures. However, a new study of tree-ring data spanning the past 400 years indicates that droughts in those cities and their surrounding regions were typically longer and more frequent centuries ago than they were for most of the 20th century.

In addition, recent decades have brought longer drought cycles similar to those prevalent before the mid-1800s. A return to drought patterns of past centuries, the study's authors say, could seriously strain the water resources of both of those densely populated regions.

"We can handle two to three-year droughts, but if three and four and five-year droughts are possible, we're not prepared," says Neil Pederson, a research professor with the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, which created the new tree-ring drought records. He adds that the familiar scene in the western U.S. of fights and lawsuits over water "is starting to play out here in the East."…

The Harlem Meer in Central Park in Winter New York City, shot by Piero d'Houin dit Triboulet, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported