Climate change may not expand drylands harvard.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from harvard.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Does a warmer climate mean more dry land? For years, researchers projected that drylands including deserts, savannas and shrublands will expand as the planet warms, but new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) challenges those prevailing views.
Previous studies used atmospheric information, including rainfall and temperature, to make projections about future land conditions. The real picture is more complicated than that, said Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper. Historically, we have relatively good records of rainfall and temperature but really poor records of the land surface, things like soil moisture and vegetation, said McColl. As a result, previous definitions of drylands are based only on how the atmosphere is behaving, as an approximation of the land surface. But models can now simulat