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Climate of 2006 - March
Arizona
Drought
National Climatic Data Center, 10 April 2006
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Regional Overview /
Paleo Perspective
 Regional Overview
Paleoclimatic Perspective
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March 2006, Pre-Instrumental Perspective, Southeast Arizona
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Arizona has been experiencing very dry conditions for much of the last seven years. The southeast corner of the state (climate division 7) has been especially hard hit. Arizona Division 7 had the second driest winter (November-March) and fifth driest year (April-March) in the 1895-2006 historical record.
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Even after much-needed rains in March, most of Arizona and adjoining New Mexico was still experiencing one of worst winter droughts on record. This return to dry conditions for the region comes after a very wet winter in 2004-2005 which provided some recovery from the severe multi-year drought of 1999-2004. The southern parts of both states received less relief from the March storms than areas to the north, and most of Arizona division 7 was still classified as "extreme drought" on the late March to early April U.S. Drought Monitor.
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The graph below (annual values in light blue, 5-year weighted average in dark blue) shows the winter (November- March) precipitation, 1896-2006, for Arizona Division 7. The value for 2006 (1.15 inches) is the lowest since 1904, although several other years were similarly low. The 1999-2004 drought (indicated with the yellow bar) had six winters in a row with precipitation below the long-term mean, which had not occurred since 1898-1904 (orange bar).
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The graph to the left also shows a 343-year tree-ring record (1650-1992; annual values in light red; 5-year smoothed values in dark red) that corresponds well to the variability in November-March precipitation. This record is the average of two Douglas-fir tree-ring chronologies from southeast Arizona. These ring-width chronologies are unusual in that they are based on only part of the annual growth ring, the "earlywood", which closely reflects the influence of winter precipitation. The chronologies were developed by Meko and Baisan (2001), who used the other part of the annual ring ("latewood") of these same trees to reconstruct variability in summer precipitation. The correlation between the annual values of the tree-ring record and November-March precipitation is 0.698, indicating a high degree of shared variance.
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The tree-ring record, as a proxy for precipitation, can put the winter precipitation variability of the last century in southeast Arizona into a much longer perspective. The record shows a handful years in the approximately 250-year period prior to 1895 that may have had very low winter precipitation similar to that of 2006; these extreme winter droughts appear to have been less frequent than in the last 100 years. The most severe and persistent multi-year periods of winter drought in the instrumental record (1898-1904 and 1999-2004) appear to have been matched or exceeded only once, in 1666-1673 (red bar). A 992-year reconstruction of November-April precipitation for Arizona Division 7, using an independent set of tree-ring data (Ni et al. 2002), confirms this assessment, and further suggests that the 1660s was the most severe and persistent period of winter drought since 1000 AD. The current winter drought, and the recent multi-year drought -- which could be resuming after a one-year hiatus -- are likely among the most severe events of their kind in the past 350 years.
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Resources:
- Divisional climate data, including precipitation for Arizona Division 7 as shown above, can be obtained from NCDC.
References:
- Meko, D. M., and Baisan, C. H., 2001. "Pilot study of latewood-width of conifers as an indicator of variability of summer rainfall in the North American Monsoon region." International Journal of Climatology 21: 697-708.
- Ni, F., Cavazos, T., Hughes, M. K., Comrie, A. C. and Funkhouser, G. 2002. "Cool-season precipitation in the southwestern USA since AD 1000: Comparison of linear and nonlinear techniques for reconstruction." International Journal of Climatology 22: 1645-1662.
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