Extreme weatherWarm ocean hot spots caused mid-1930s U.S. Dust Bowl

Two ocean hot spots have been found to be the potential drivers of the hottest summers on record for the central United States in 1934 and 1936. The new research may also help modern forecasters predict particularly hot summers over the central United States many months out.

The unusually hot summers of 1934/36 broke heat records that still stand today. They were part of the devastating dust bowl decade in the United States when massive dust storms traveled as far as New York, Boston, and Atlanta, covering the decks of ships with silt 450 km off the east coast.

A UNSW release reports that research by the University of New South Wales’s (UNSW) Dr. Markus Donat from the ARC Center of Excellence for Climate System Science and colleagues has revealed that unusually warm sea surface temperatures occurring at exactly the same time in two very specific locations were likely responsible for creating the record breaking heat.

“In the Pacific, there were anomalously warm ocean temperatures along the coastline of the Gulf of Alaska stretching down as far as Los Angeles,” said Donat. “On the other side of the country in the Atlantic Ocean, in a relatively small area off the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia, the ocean surface was also unusually warm. Together they reduced spring rainfall and created perfect conditions for scorching hot temperatures to evelop in the heart of the United States.”

As part of their study, the researchers compared the large-scale climate conditions in 1934 and 1936 with those of the extensive recent hot drought years of 2011 and 2012 to see if there were any similarities to the dust bowl years.

They found that in 2011-12, while there were definitely warm ocean temperatures off the coast of Nova Scotia and Maine, the same was not true along the coastline of the Gulf of Alaska, where ocean temperatures were below normal.

“The large scale ocean conditions in 2011 and 2012 were very different from 1934 and 1936, suggesting an event of a quite different nature,” Donat said. “Only very rarely have we seen these very specific ocean regions warm at the same time over the past century, but those combined warm anomalies were never as strong as during the two record breaking years of 1934 and 1936.”

This unusual ocean warming in two regions compounded the impacts on the atmosphere and pressure gradients across the continental US, profoundly changing the weather systems during the spring and summers.

The Atlantic warming off Nova Scotia and Maine meant southerly winds shifted further north-east and the transport of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico northward into the Central United States was weakened.  At the same time, the Pacific Ocean warming expanded a large Pacific high that also contributed to reduced transport of moist air into the central United States.

“Not only did the warming amplify summer temperatures, it also reduced spring rainfall,” Donat said. “To make matter worse, past research has shown the atmospheric dust over Western North America once summer was underway had a positive feedback that intensified the high pressure system even further.”

“The United States has been very fortunate that it has not seen a repeat of this coincident ocean warming at such a level. Should this ocean warming reoccur in exactly the same constellation, because of climate change it is likely the temperature impacts would be even more devastating and those old records may be surpassed.”

— Read more in Markus G. Donat et al., “Extraordinary heat during the 1930s U.S. Dust Bowl and associated large-scale conditions,” Climate Dynamics (April 2015) (10.1007/s00382-015-2590-5)