20th Century One of Driest in Nine Centuries for Northwest Africa, page 1

Droughts in the late 20th century rival some of North Africa's major droughts of centuries past, reveals new research that peers back in time to the year 1179.

The first multi-century drought reconstruction that includes Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia shows frequent and severe droughts during the 13th and 16th centuries and the latter part of the 20th century.

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The team has developed the first systematically sampled network of tree-ring chronologies across northwest Africa, said co-author David Meko, also of UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. The network allowed the researchers to analyze the patterns of past droughts over the whole region, said Meko, a UA associate research professor. The width of the annual growth rings on trees in semi-arid environments is highly correlated with the amount of precipitation.

The spatial extent of the new regional tree-ring chronology revealed that drought in Morocco is not driven by the same kinds of oceanic and atmospheric conditions as drought in Algeria and Tunisia. Drought in Morocco is strongly related to the north/south seesaw of air-pressure anomalies in the North Atlantic Ocean called the North Atlantic Oscillation. However, drought in Morocco is only weakly related to El Nino. By contrast, drought in Algeria and Tunisia appears more linked to a warm tropical Atlantic Ocean.

Tree-ring chronologies exist for centuries deep in the past, but they are "floating," meaning that there is no continuous record linking those chronologies to ones that reach back from the present, he said. "If we can bridge this gap, it will be a discovery for the world," Touchan said.