USA: Think flash floods are bad? Buckle up for flash droughts

Source(s): Wired, Condé Nast Digital

By Matt Simon

In late spring of 2012, climactic chaos descended upon the Midwest and Great Plains in the midst of the growing season. A drought is supposed to unfold on a timeline of seasons to years, but in the two weeks between June 12 and 26, the High Plains went from what a monitoring group called “abnormally dry” to “severe drought.” The affected area ballooned from covering 30 percent of the continental US in May to over 60 percent by August, with the agricultural losses tallying in the tens of billions of dollars.

[…]

The region had crashed into a “flash” drought—think of it like a flash flood, only far bigger and therefore far more consequential. It’s a phenomenon science is just beginning to understand, let alone predict. But today in the journal Nature Climate Change, two dozen researchers—atmospheric scientists, computer scientists, climate scientists, and more—are publishing a perspective piece trying to get their community to agree on a standard definition for a flash drought, and to set research priorities for the future. Why, for instance, do flash droughts happen in the first place? How can scientists get better at predicting them and giving water managers warning? And if climate change is making the world drier in general, what does that mean for flash droughts?

[…]

“I think the challenge with drought, just in general, that makes it so much different than any other hazard—much more challenging and very costly—is the fact that it has a very potentially large spatial footprint and a very potentially long temporal footprint,” says Mark Svoboda, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center and coauthor on the new paper. “Compared to a flood, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, there they have a relatively small impact area, and they last a very short amount of time.”

[…]

The problem is that this score deals in subjective judgments, and necessarily so. For scientists to actually quantify how things might get worse in the future thanks to climate change, they need objective measurements. “We don't have a US Drought Monitor for the future,” Pendergrass says. “We need to have a different, more objective definition of flash drought in order to be able to even quantify how models project that flash drought could change.”

[…]

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Hazards Drought
Country and region United States of America
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