Predicting flash droughts is challenging. And climate change is leading to more of them.
“This finding has massive implications for ecosystem conservation and agricultural management,” says Christine O’Connell, an ecosystem ecologist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., who was not involved in the study. “Will some species of plants be less able to survive a trend towards flash droughts? What would that mean for biodiversity or the amount of carbon stored in an ecosystem?”
To find out, Xing Yuan, a hydrologist at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in China, and colleagues analysed soil moisture data from around the world from 1951 to 2014. They distinguished between flash and slow subseasonal droughts by exploring the rate at which soils dried during the initial period of drought onset, then calculated how often each occurred and the geographic spread.
The climate anomalies, such as heat waves, driving these flash droughts are more extreme than those that drive seasonal or interannual droughts, which leads to severe droughts in a shorter time, Yuan says.As with most droughts, a period of low rainfall is still the main driver of flash droughts. But excessive evapotranspiration — water moving into the atmosphere from soil and plants — plays a key role in these droughts’ emergence by drying out soils quickly, the analysis shows.
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