The drought started in the eastern Mediterranean Levant region and covered the areas including Turkey, Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria.
Scientists at NASA decided to refashion the drought history in the Mediterranean. Here, they used a record called Old World Drought Atlas in which they studied tree rings to be able to understand the climate and the reason for the reduction in water from that particular area.
While thick rings were indicators of years when water was available in abundance, thin rings showed vice-versa.
Not only did the team identify the driest years but they also tried to differentiate between naturally caused droughts and the same droughts worsened by human hand.
As per Ben Cook, Ben Cook, lead author and climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, if this particular series of events are seen, human-caused climate change has also given its contributions. One such weather condition is the Levant drought from 1998-2012 which happens to be 50 percent drier than the driest period in 50 decades.
North Atlantic Oscillation and the East Atlantic Pattern are the influencers of dry weather in the Middle East. These weather patterns are circulating airflow systems. They illustrate how ocean conditions influence weather and the wind.
According to Yochanan Kushnir, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, "The Mediterranean is going to dry in the future mainly due to climate change as shown in climate models. The drought in the Middle East appears to be different than conditions in the rest of the world. Thus, Middle East may have been observing effects of man-made climate change already.
Image Credit: bbc.co.uk, Story by NASA