Ocean temperatures may be protecting Earth from a planet-wide drought

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), working with international collaborators, have discovered that ocean temperature patterns play a key role in limiting how widely droughts spread across the globe. Their findings, published in Communications Earth & Environment, are based on climate records spanning 1901-2020. The analysis shows that synchronized droughts typically affect only 1.8% to 6.5% of Earth's land at the same time. This is far...