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.
Highlights
Flash droughts refer to a type of droughts that have rapid intensification without sufficient early warning
We find a significant increase in flash drought risk over China during the middle and end of this century, especially over southern China, where both human and ecosystems have high exposure and poor adaptability
The recovery threshold could increase from 20th to 40th percentile, here the 20th percentile is chosen to exclude many events that can last for more than 3–6 months if the 30th or 40th percentile threshold is used, where those events should be regarded as seasonal droughts instead of flash droughts
Summary
Flash droughts refer to a type of droughts that have rapid intensification without sufficient early warning. A popular definition for flash drought events in the hydro-climate community is based on the joint distribution of positive temperature anomaly (e.g., heatwave) and soil moisture deficit[13,20,26], the eco-hydrological community has different opinions from the perspective of flash drought impact[16]. The former essentially defines an event with concurrent heat extreme and dry conditions, but not necessarily a drought event. Our results suggest that non-traditional drought regions should receive attention for drought adaptation, given the increasing risk of flash droughts in a changing climate
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