Flash droughts : How are they linked to climate change?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- Source: www.science.or...
The last six decades have recorded a transition towards ‘flash droughts’ in 74% of the global regions, mainly due to human-induced climate change. This is according to a study published in Science. Under high-emission scenarios, the onset speed of droughts will also increase. Flash droughts are abrupt dry spells which are replacing slower onslaughts, making them harder to predict. As opposed to the gradual onset of a slow drought lasting months or even years due to large-scale climate patterns like El Nino, the effects of a flash drought can be seen within days or weeks.
The scientists analysed the soil moisture data between 1951 and 2014 and included spells that lasted 20 days or longer. This excluded spells that were too short to cause any significant damage. They calculated the rate at which the soil dried up during the initial period of drought. Heatwaves during flash droughts are also more intense than seasonal ones. These have been recorded more in tropical regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the western coast of South America, Southern Australia and the Amazon basin. In future, this could have disastrous consequences, especially for farmers in these regions who depend on rain-fed agriculture, since abrupt dry spells could damage crops and compromise the country’s food security.
Xing Yuan, a hydrologist at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in China and lead author of the study, said that even for slower droughts the onset speed has been increasing. Interest in flash droughts has increased over the last decade, especially after the United States faced its worst drought in over half a century in the summer of 2012. Many affected areas transformed from normal to extreme drought conditions within a month, and none of the climate models were able to predict it. This led to over $30 billion in losses. Last year, China’s Yangtze River was struck by a flash drought due to high temperatures that developed within a month and triggered wildfires. Parts of southern China faced energy shortages due to this because there was no hydropower. In the tropics, the rainy seasons maintain moisture in soil and vegetation. But when rains fail unexpectedly, the equatorial heat can desiccate the ground beyond expectation. Flash droughts can give humans little time to adapt, like diverting water sources or controlling wildfires. Yuan says that monitoring systems will need to be improved in the near future because current systems often cannot capture drought onsets at short enough time scales.
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It's time now we construct reservoirs to keep water table at check
Thanks a lot Rohini for brining such informative videos ❤
absolutely genuine topic
love down to earth ❤❤❤❤
Good & relevant.
Nice think
well explained mam
You should look at what happened in the past about the three year global winter starting in 536 AD to 539 AD and 1816 the year with out a summer. All in documented globally. We are do for this to happen again and it will not be caused by Man.
Relevance?
❤
Save Our Planet - Change Now
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More like people sabotaging other countries resources and saying it’s climate change😂
Has your research in making this video cover solar geoengineering? I guess not. Burning fossil fuel has become the 'straw man' in every discussion around climate change.
Fascinating! Tell us more about this "solar geoengineering". And please provide citations from credible sources to back up your claims.
Geoengineering is not something to be taken lightly. Intentionally experimenting with the earths climate should be a last resort, once all other options have been exhausted, as we have no data on what kind of effects various methods of geoengineering could have.