The Drivers and Impacts of Future Analogs of the 2011–2014 Drought in the Western and Central United States

Abstract Anthropogenic climate change will alter the large‐scale drivers of meteorological drought, and its impacts on hydrology and ecosystems, with critical implications for drought predictability and related risks. We present an integrated assessment of these changes for simulated analogs of an observed drought between 2011 and 2014 in the western and central United States. We utilize a framework for identifying and classifying droughts based on their precipitation deficits and spatiotemporal characteristics, identifying 24,981 droughts between 1900 and 2100 in 63 simulations from 16 climate models. Focusing on the subset (182 or 0.73%) with spatiotemporal characteristics most similar to the observed event (i.e., the analogs), we find that there are less of these droughts in the future, and that the severity of their hydrological and ecological impacts changes, even relative to secular climate change. Furthermore, we find that these droughts are more consistently associated with certain large‐scale atmosphere‐ocean conditions, suggesting that their drivers may become more predictable.