1JULY 2008 S EAGER ET AL. 3261 Would Advance Knowledge of 1930s SSTs Have Allowed Prediction of the Dust Bowl Drought?*

• Main Authors: Richard Seager, Yochanan Kushnir, Mingfang Ting, Mark Cane, Naomi Naik, Jennifer Miller
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: Pacific; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.177.7992; http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/pub/seager/Seager_etal_dbowl_2008.pdf

Could the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s have been predicted in advance if the SST anomalies of the 1930s had been foreknown? Ensembles of model simulations forced with historical observed SSTs in the global ocean, and also separately in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, are compared with an ensemble begun in January 1929 with modeled atmosphere and land initial conditions and integrated through the 1930s with climatological SSTs. The ensemble with climatological SSTs produces values for the precipitation averaged over 1932–39 that are not statistically different from model climatology. In contrast, the ensembles with global SST forcing produce a drought centered in the central plains and southwestern North America that is clearly separated from the model climatology. Both the tropical Pacific and northern tropical Atlantic SST anomalies produce a statistically significant model drought in this region. The modeled drought has a spatial pattern that is different from the observed drought, which was instead centered in the central and northern plains and also impacted the northern Rocky Mountain states but not northeastern Mexico. The model error in extending the Dust Bowl drought too far south is attributed to an incorrect response of the model to warm subtropical North Atlantic SST anomalies. The model error in the northern states cannot be attributed to an incorrect response to tropical SST anomalies. The model also fails