Nightmare Droughts in the West Recorded in Tree Rings: History of Extreme Weather (VIDEO)

Drought continues to plague the west, parching crops and land. Now, researchers have taken a look back in history and have catalogued some of the worst droughts to date with the use of tree rings.

With sandpaper and microscopes, the researchers examined rings from drought-sensitive tree species from the Weber river basin in Utah. This allowed them to create a tree-ring chronology that extends back 585 years into Utah's natural history. They also took modern stream flow measurements to calibrate the correlation between ring thickness and drought severity. In the end, they found several types of scenarios that could make life more than a little uncomfortable in Utah, a state that's been plagued by drought in the past.

"We're conservatively estimating the severity of these droughts that hit before the modern record, and we still see some that are kind of scary if they were to happen again," said Matthew Bekker, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We would really have to change the way we do things here."

The west's climate fluctuates a lot more than it did in the 1900s. In fact, the previous five centuries each saw more years of extremely dry and extremely wet climate conditions. The researchers discovered that the year 1703 kicked off 16 years in a row with below average stream flow. In addition, the Weber River flowed at just 13 percent of normal in 1580 and dropped below 20 percent in three other periods.

"We're trying to work with water managers to show the different flavors of droughts this region has had," said Bekker in a news release. "These are scenarios you need to build into your models to know how to plan for the future."

The findings are published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association.

Want to learn more about droughts? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.