Western US to Face Worst Droughts in 1000 Years

California is already suffering from the worst drought in a millennium, and now new research shows parts of the Western United States are to face the same fate with decades-long "megadroughts."

"Unprecedented drought conditions" - the worst in more than 1,000 years - are to plague the US Southwest and Great Plains after 2050 with devastating impacts, according to a new study in the journal Science Advances. While previous studies have already predicted that the Southwest could dry due to global warming, this is the first to say that it could surpass the worst arid conditions seen in the United States' history, including the 1930s Dust Bowl that lasted for more than 35 years.

"Nearly every year is going to be dry toward the end of the 21st century compared to what we think of as normal conditions now," lead author Benjamin Cook, a NASA atmospheric scientist, told the Arizona Daily Star. "We're going to have to think about a much drier future in western North America."

There's more than an 80 percent chance that much of the central and western United States will have a 35-year-or-longer "megadrought" later this century, according to the researchers. And they blame this bleak future on human-caused global warming - a topic that even the US Senate can't agree on.

Cook and his colleagues based their predictions on hundreds of tree-ring chronologies from the past 2,500 years, which compiled into the North American Drought Atlas. This data indicates drought conditions over the past millennia. Compared with 17 different future climate models, the results show that droughts are likely to be worse than even the medieval dry periods during the 12^th and 13^th centuries, and worse than the current drought out West, which has endured for 11 of the last 14 years.