King Team Studies 500 Years of North American Hot Drought
Assistant Professor Karen King joined the UT Department of Geography and Sustainability in August 2023, bringing with her specialties in dendrochronology, paleoclimate, biogeography, forest ecology, and fire-climate interactions. She applies her experience in these areas as lead author on research published in the January 2024 Science Advances.
Her team used tree-ring chronologies to develop data that reconstructs a 500-year history of summer temperatures across western North America in the paper “Increasing Prevalence of Hot Drought Across Western North America Since the 16th Century.” They combined their new dataset with preexisting drought and precipitation data to connect a historical record with current geographical climate conditions.
Their findings indicate that hot drought—combined heat and drought conditions—has been more severe over the last century than ever before. The reconstruction allows for important new findings regarding the influence of summer temperatures on the development of notable past droughts in western North America.
King’s ongoing research builds on these findings.
“I am currently working on expanding the Western North American Temperature Atlas to provide complete spatiotemporal coverage of the entire North American continent over at least the past 500 years: the North American Temperature Atlas,” said King. “This will allow for a more complete evaluation of the spatial patterns of temperature-drought interactions back through time.”
Her research was picked up by The Washington Post and State of The Planet.
