thumb|300px|A typical dry lakebed is seen in droughts in California|California, which experienced its worst megadrought in 1,200 years in 2022. The drought was precipitated by [[climate change. California rationed water in response.]] A megadrought is an exceptionally severe drought, lasting for many years and covering a wide area.
thumb|300px|A typical dry lakebed is seen in droughts in California|California, which experienced its worst megadrought in 1,200 years in 2022. The drought was precipitated by [[climate change. California rationed water in response.]] A megadrought is an exceptionally severe drought, lasting for many years and covering a wide area.
==Definition== There is no exact definition of a megadrought. The term was first used by Connie Woodhouse and Jonathan Overpeck in their 1998 paper, 2000 Years of Drought Variability in the Central United States. In this, it referred to two periods of severe drought in the US – one at the end of the 13th century and the other in the middle of the 16th century. The term was then popularised as a similar severe drought affected the Southwestern US from the year 2000.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).