Abstract
Flash drought is a term and concept that has gained increasing attention in the research literature and media since it was first coined in the United States in the early 2000s to describe a drought that has undergone rapid intensification. In Australia the term has recently been used in reference to the 2017/18 drought in eastern Australia. Due to its rapid intensification, the impacts of flash droughts will likely occur too quickly for many of the usual drought-coping mechanisms to be deployed. This study proposes the use of the evaporative stress index (ESI), the standardized anomaly of the actual evapotranspiration to potential evapotranspiration ratio, to identify flash droughts in Australia computed using daily outputs from the Bureau of Meteorology’s land surface water balance model AWRA-L. The case study of the January 2018 flash drought in eastern Australia is used to assess and demonstrate the suitability of the ESI. Results show that the ESI accurately highlighted the event and offered potential for flash drought pre-warning by a few weeks. In addition, the availability of long term high-resolution outputs from AWRA-L offers the ability to investigate multiple flash drought events in detail for greater understanding and to inform stakeholders.
Highlights
Flash drought is a relatively new term that has emerged out of the United States (US), first introduced by Svoboda et al (2002), but only coming into more common usage in the US in recent years in response to devastating droughts that developed rapidly during 2011 and 2012 (Otkin et al 2018)
This suggests that the evaporative stress index (ESI) data is indicative of physical processes, suggesting that the method may be suitable for flash drought monitoring for Australia
This study aimed at applying the ESI method that has been extensively used in the US by Otkin et al 2018 to monitor flash drought in Australia
Summary
Flash drought is a relatively new term that has emerged out of the United States (US), first introduced by Svoboda et al (2002), but only coming into more common usage in the US in recent years in response to devastating droughts that developed rapidly during 2011 and 2012 (Otkin et al 2018). As has been succinctly stated recently in the Australian media, ‘the speed at which impacts are felt is the flash drought’s defining feature’ (Doyle 2018) This usage is consistent with what was originally intended when the term was coined by Svoboda et al (2002), who aimed to draw attention to the unusually rapid intensification of some droughts. Flash droughts have no restriction on their duration, and Otkin et al (2018) propose that the term ‘flash drought’ should be reserved for the time period during which the rapid intensification occurred Taking these examples, the ‘flash’ part of the definition is relative to the type of drought and needs to be scaled
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