How anthropogenic climate change will affect hydroclimate in the arid regions of southwestern North America has implications for the allocation of water resources and the course of regional development. Here we show 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. If these models are correct, 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.

The mechanisms of changes in the large-scale hydrological cycle projected by 15 models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 and used for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report are analyzed by computing differences between 2046 and 2065 and 1961 and 2000. The contributions to changes in precipitation minus evaporation, P 2 E, caused thermodynamically by changes in specific humidity, dynamically by changes in circulation, and by changes in moisture transports by transient eddies are evaluated. The thermodynamic and dynamic contributions are further separated into advective and divergent components. The nonthermodynamic contributions are then related to changes in the mean and transient circulation. The projected change in P 2 E involves an intensification of the existing pattern of P 2 E with wet areas [the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) and mid-to high latitudes] getting wetter and arid and semiarid regions of the subtropics getting drier. In addition, the subtropical dry zones expand poleward. The accentuation of the twentieth-century pattern of P 2 E is in part explained by increases in specific humidity via both advection and divergence terms. Weakening of the tropical divergent circulation partially opposes the thermodynamic contribution by creating a tendency to decreased P 2 E in the ITCZ and to increased P 2 E in the descending branches of the Walker and Hadley cells. The changing mean circulation also causes decreased P 2 E on the poleward flanks of the subtropics because the descending branch of the Hadley Cell expands and the midlatitude meridional circulation cell shifts poleward. Subtropical drying and poleward moistening are also contributed to by an increase in poleward moisture transport by transient eddies. The thermodynamic contribution to changing P 2 E, arising from increased specific humidity, is almost entirely accounted for by atmospheric warming under fixed relative humidity.

The causes of persistent droughts and wet periods, or pluvials, over western North America are examined in model simulations of the period from 1856 to 2000. The simulations used either (i) global sea surface temperature data as a lower boundary condition or (ii) observed data in just the tropical Pacific and computed the surface ocean temperature elsewhere with a simple ocean model. With both arrangements, the model was able to simulate many aspects of the low-frequency (periods greater than 6 yr) variations of precipitation over the Great Plains and in the American Southwest including much of the nineteenth-century variability, the droughts of the 1930s (the “Dust Bowl”) and 1950s, and the very wet period in the 1990s. Results indicate that the persistent droughts and pluvials were ultimately forced by persistent variations of tropical Pacific surface ocean temperatures. It is argued that ocean temperature variations outside of the tropical Pacific, but forced from the tropical Pacific, act to strengthen the droughts and pluvials. The persistent precipitation variations are part of a pattern of global variations that have a strong hemispherically and zonally symmetric component, which is akin to interannual variability, and that can be explained in terms of interactions between tropical ocean temperature variations, the subtropical jets, transient eddies, and the eddy-driven mean meridional circulation. Rossby wave propagation poleward and eastward from the tropical Pacific heating anomalies disrupts the zonal symmetry, intensifying droughts and pluvials over North America. Both mechanisms of tropical driving of extratropical precipitation variations work in summer as well as winter and can explain the year-round nature of the precipitation variations. In addition, land–atmosphere interactions over North America appear important by (i) translating winter precipitation variations into summer evaporation and, hence, precipitation anomalies and (ii) shifting the northward flow of moisture around the North Atlantic subtropical anticyclone eastward from the Plains and Southwest to the eastern seaboard and western Atlantic Ocean.