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Central American drought
Understanding drought patterns across Central America's 'Dry Corridor' is crucial for adaptation planning and impact mitigation. We analyzed historical and predicted drought patterns from local rain gauge records, reanalysis data and a 20-member ensemble of bias-corrected, downscaled CMIP-5 GCMs at both seasonal (3 month) and annual (12 month) scales. Our results suggest seasonal-scale droughts are projected to lengthen by 12-30%, intensify by 17-42% and increase in frequency by 21-24% by end-of-century. Longer-term droughts are projected to lengthen by 68% under moderate emissions, potentially triple in length under high emissions and to intensify by 27-74%.
(Depsky & Pons, 2021)
notable citation:
IPCC 6th Assessment Report (WG II, Ch. 12)
Assessing International and Internal Migration Trends in Guatemala
This ongoing work is centered on building models that predict the observed variance in census-reported international emigration from, and internal migration within Guatemala using a collection of sociodemographic, physical and climatic covariates. So far, I have found that the majority (~55%) of the variance in international emigration reported at the household level between 2002 and 2018 can be explained in this way, with both sociodemographic and drought stress-related variables emerging as significant predictors of emigration.
(paper forthcoming)
