Anthropogenic shift towards higher risk of flash drought over China

Abstract

Flash droughts refer to a type of droughts that have rapid intensification without sufficient early warning. To date, how will the flash drought risk change in a warming future climate remains unknown due to a diversity of flash drought definition, unclear role of anthropogenic fingerprints, and uncertain socioeconomic development. Here we propose a new method for explicitly characterizing flash drought events, and find that the exposure risk over China will increase by about 23% ± 11% during the middle of this century under a socioeconomic scenario with medium challenge. Optimal fingerprinting shows that anthropogenic climate change induced by the increased greenhouse gas concentrations accounts for 77% ± 26% of the upward trend of flash drought frequency, and population increase is also an important factor for enhancing the exposure risk of flash drought over southernmost humid regions. Our results suggest that the traditional drought-prone regions would expand given the human-induced intensification of flash drought risk.

Flash droughts present a new challenge for subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction

“…These include relationships among soil moisture, land-atmosphere interactions, their connections to large-scale meteorological conditions (and precursor conditions), and how these are forced by remote SST patterns and influenced by internal atmospheric variability. Furthermore, research is needed into how these conditions will change as the climate base state changes 52,84 , and to incorporate the changing climate into the definition of flash drought so that flash-drought definitions remain meaningful in the future.…”

Unprecedented Europe Heat in June–July 2019: Risk in the Historical and Future Context

“…The biases in CMIP6 and CMIP5 simulations were corrected for both historical and future periods by using the cumulative density function (CDF)‐matching method (Li et al, 2010), which has been used in hydrological modeling and extreme events attribution (Jiao & Yuan, 2019; Yuan et al, 2019). First, the CDFs from CMIP6/ALL (CMIP5/ALL) simulations were adjusted to the observed CDFs for the period 1950–2014 (1950–2005).…”

Remote sensing of the impact of flash drought events on terrestrial carbon dynamics over China

“…The meteorological stations are mainly distributed over eastern China, so the gridded data may have larger uncertainty over western China [ 30 ]. However, our previous study [ 4 ] suggests that flash droughts over western China are much less frequent than those over eastern China, so the influence of observation uncertainty might be limited. The climatology of in situ meteorological observations is firstly interpolated by thin-plate smoothing splines, and the anomalies of the meteorological variables derived from angular distance weighting method is added to the climatology to obtain the gridded meteorological variables.…”

“…Flash drought is characterized by rapid development from normal to dry conditions at sub-seasonal timescales [ 1 – 4 ]. The rapid onset of drought leaves limited time for preparation and drought mitigation, causing devastating impacts due to insufficient early warning [ 5 , 6 ].…”

“…The rapid onset of drought leaves limited time for preparation and drought mitigation, causing devastating impacts due to insufficient early warning [ 5 , 6 ]. The increasing frequency of flash drought in a warming climate [ 4 , 7 ] presents a higher risk on vegetation health, food security, and ecosystem and environmental sustainability [ 8 , 9 ]. Extreme drought events could dampen carbon uptake and accelerate atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations [ 10 – 12 ].…”