Large contribution from anthropogenic warming to an emerging North American megadrought (NCEI Accession 0209529)

This is an archive of the gridded climate, soil moisture, and reconstruction datasets produced for an evaluation of recent observed western North American drought conditions in the context of the past 1200 years and a climate-change attribution approach to evaluate the possible contribution of anthropogenic climate change to recent drought anomalies.

The datasets are gridded spatiotemporal cubes stored as netCDF files as well as text files with annual time series of regionally averaged drought metrics. The gridded climate datasets have 1/8- and 1/4-degree resolution are calibrated versions of multiple data products to allow for full North American coverage for the 1901-2018 period at monthly and daily time scales. The soil-moisture datasets are also gridded at 1/8- and 1/4-degree resolutions, span 1901-2018, and were calculated using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrological model and bucket moisture-balance modeling. The reconstructions are of annualized summer soil moisture at 1/2-degree resolution for western North America. This data archive also contains time series of the 1,521 tree-ring width indices (RWI) used for the reconstructions.