Kyungmin (Kay) Sung, a postdoctoral scholar at Stagge Hydrology Lab at The Ohio State University is the lead author of a study titled Ongoing and Future Projected Intensification of Wet and Dry Extremes in North America. She presented her research at the poster session during the American Geophysical Union's (AGU's) annual meeting in Chicago, IL, last month.

This study shows how proxy, observed, and projected model datasets can be integrated to evaluate recent and future changes in North America's meteorological droughts and pluvial extremes at a multi-centennial scale.

She and her colleagues have expanded a spline-based Nonstationary Standardized Precipitation Index (NSPI) model to simultaneously account for shared trends and data-specific bias-correction across multiple data types. They found many regions in North America are experiencing a significant intensification of wet and dry extremes compared to the past 1000 years of presumed natural climate variability with more subtle changes at regional and seasonal scales. The research underscores the need for reassessing the severities of recent drought and pluvial events, considering changes in typical climate at multi-decadal and centennial scales.

Co-authors on this project include Professors Jim Stagge and Gil Bohrer in the Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering department at Ohio State and Max Torbenson, post doctoral scholar, currently a Research Associate at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany,. Stagge is also a principal investigator at the Byrd Center.