The dry conditions will make it almost impossible to live the current normal conditions across the U.S. because of the forthcoming drought expected to be the worst in a millennium.

It would likely hit most the U.S. south-west and the Great Plains, said Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and co-author of the study that forecast the drought, reports the Guardian.

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The research, titled Unprecedented 21^st-Century Drought Risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains, was published in the online Journal Science Advances.

Rising temperatures due to climate change, which U.S. President Barack Obama had said is the bigger threat to Americans than terrorism, will result in the two regions drying out by the second half of the 21^st century.

That dry condition would make past major droughts "seem like quaint walks through the garden of Eden," Smerdon said.

According to the study, the chance that the Central Plains would suffer from drought doubled to 95 percent for the period 2050-2099 from 45 percent in 1950-2000. For the South-west, the projection is 98 percent chance from 62 percent for the same time frames.

Since the turn of the millennium, the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas had gone through 11 years of drought, but the coming times would be considered punishment era. NASA estimates that it affected 64 million people.

In California, which is on its fourth consecutive year of drought, cities made water rationing mandatory, farmers have left their fields and some have sold their animals as the state suffers its worst dry spell in 1,200 years.

Smerdon warns, "We haven't seen this kind of prolonged drought even certainly in modern US history. What this study has shown is the likelihood that multi-decadal events comprising year after year after year of extreme dry events could be something in our future."

Since droughts are slow-moving natural hazards that humans are used to dealing with and managing, "we really need to start thinking in longer-term horizons about how we're going to manage it," Washington Post quotes Toby Ault, co-author of the study and assistant professor at Cornell's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

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