The Drought of Amazonia in 2005

Abstract In 2005, large sections of southwestern Amazonia experienced one of the most intense droughts of the last hundred years. The drought severely affected human population along the main channel of the Amazon River and its western and southwestern tributaries, the Solimoes (also known as the Amazon River in the other Amazon countries) and the Madeira Rivers, respectively. The river levels fell to historic low levels and navigation along these rivers had to be suspended. The drought did not affect central or eastern Amazonia, a pattern different from the El Nino–related droughts in 1926, 1983, and 1998. The choice of rainfall data used influenced the detection of the drought. While most datasets (station or gridded data) showed negative departures from mean rainfall, one dataset exhibited above-normal rainfall in western Amazonia. The causes of the drought were not related to El Nino but to (i) the anomalously warm tropical North Atlantic, (ii) the reduced intensity in northeast trade wind moisture tr...

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