Identification

Title

Getting ahead of flash drought: From early warning to early action

Abstract

Flash droughts, characterized by their unusually rapid intensification, have garnered increasing attention within the weather, climate, agriculture, and ecological communities in recent years due to their large environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Because flash droughts intensify quickly, they require different early warning capabilities and management approaches than are typically used for slower-developing "conventional" droughts. In this essay, we describe an integrated research-and-applications agenda that emphasizes the need to reconceptualize our understanding of flash drought within existing drought early warning systems by focusing on opportunities to improve monitoring and prediction. We illustrate the need for engagement among physical scientists, social scientists, operational monitoring and forecast centers, practitioners, and policy-makers to inform how they view, monitor, predict, plan for, and respond to flash drought. We discuss five related topics that together constitute the pillars of a robust flash drought early warning system, including the development of 1) a physically based identification framework, 2) comprehensive drought monitoring capabilities, and 3) improved prediction over various time scales that together 4) aid impact assessments and 5) guide decision-making and policy. We provide specific recommendations to illustrate how this fivefold approach could be used to enhance decision-making capabilities of practitioners, develop new areas of research, and provide guidance to policy-makers attempting to account for flash drought in drought preparedness and response plans.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d73b640f

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2022-10-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact