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Water availability in the Levant is predicted to decline due to global warming in the upcoming decades and is expected to substantially impact the region. Determining the long-term natural rainfall variability in this region is essential for understanding the regional hydroclimatic response to external climate forcings and for contex- tualizing future hydroclimate changes. The Dead Sea (DS), located in the southern Levant, is a closed-basin lake whose size varies as a function of water availability. Reconstructing DS lake-level variations through time provides a quantitative measure of the natural hydroclimate variability and can inform on the local hydroclimate response to changes in global climate. Here, we constructed an updated lake-level history of the Holocene DS by: 1) studying lake high-stands derived from a series of new cores collected in the DS southern basin, 2) re-dating of the two major Holocene high-stand exposures, and 3) compiling all previously published ages of Holocene DS lake-level markers (n = 296 radiocarbon ages). The results show that the early (10–6.1 kyr cal BP) and late Holocene (3.6–0 kyr cal BP) in the DS were predominantly wet albeit punctuated by dry intervals, whereas the middle Holocene (6.1–3.6 kyr cal BP) was most likely relatively dry. This pattern of two Holocene humid in- tervals is also evident in distillation records derived from Levant speleothem caves (which represent the inte- grated magnitude of rainout from the vapor source to the caves), indicating that rainfall intensity and total water availability were correlated throughout the Holocene. These two humid intervals occurred during high and low summer insolation conditions, suggesting that they were modulated by different climatic mechanisms. The predicted future drying in the Levant is of similar magnitude to the natural hydroclimate variability and thus, it is crucial to assess whether the anthropogenic drying is in- or out-of phase with the natural climate variability. 

Abstract Energetic particles emitted by active stars are likely to propagate in astrospheric magnetized plasma and disrupted by the prior passage of energetic coronal mass ejections (CMEs). We carried out test-particle simulations of ∼GeV protons produced at a variety of distances from the M1Ve star AU Microscopii by coronal flares or traveling shocks. Particles are propagated within a large-scale quiescent three-dimensional magnetic field and stellar wind reconstructed from measured magnetograms, and within the same stellar environment following the passage of a 10 36 erg kinetic energy CME. In both cases, magnetic fluctuations with an isotropic power spectrum are overlayed onto the large-scale stellar magnetic field and particle propagation out to the two innnermost confirmed planets is examined. In the quiescent case, the magnetic field concentrates the particles into two regions near the ecliptic plane. After the passage of the CME, the closed field lines remain inflated and the reshuffled magnetic field remains highly compressed, shrinking the scattering mean free path of the particles. In the direction of propagation of the CME lobes the subsequent energetic particle (EP) flux is suppressed. Even for a CME front propagating out of the ecliptic plane, the EP flux along the planetary orbits highly fluctuates and peaks at ∼2–3 orders of magnitude higher than the average solar value at Earth, both in the quiescent and the post-CME cases. 

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of short-term (~1 y) drought events—the most common duration of drought—globally. Yet the impact of this intensification of drought on ecosystem functioning remains poorly resolved. This is due in part to the widely disparate approaches ecologists have employed to study drought, variation in the severity and duration of drought studied, and differences among ecosystems in vegetation, edaphic and climatic attributes that can mediate drought impacts. To overcome these problems and better identify the factors that modulate drought responses, we used a coordinated distributed experiment to quantify the impact of short-term drought on grassland and shrubland ecosystems. With a standardized approach, we imposed ~a single year of drought at 100 sites on six continents. Here we show that loss of a foundational ecosystem function—aboveground net primary production (ANPP)—was 60% greater at sites that experienced statistically extreme drought (1-in-100-y event) vs. those sites where drought was nominal (historically more common) in magnitude (35% vs. 21%, respectively). This reduction in a key carbon cycle process with a single year of extreme drought greatly exceeds previously reported losses for grasslands and shrublands. Our global experiment also revealed high variability in drought response but that relative reductions in ANPP were greater in drier ecosystems and those with fewer plant species. Overall, our results demonstrate with unprecedented rigor that the global impacts of projected increases in drought severity have been significantly underestimated and that drier and less diverse sites are likely to be most vulnerable to extreme drought.