I have been hearing a new weather term, or at least one I don’t recall hearing before. Flash floods sure, but flash droughts?
Where here is the US Government page on it. www.drought.gov/…
Flash drought is simply the rapid onset or intensification of drought. It is set in motion by lower-than-normal rates of precipitation, accompanied by abnormally high temperatures, winds, and radiation. Together, these changes in weather can rapidly alter the local climate.
Higher temperature increases evapotranspiration—the process by which water is transferred from the land to the atmosphere by evaporation from the soil and by transpiration from plants—and further lowers soil moisture, which decreases rapidly as drought conditions continue.
If not predicted and discovered early enough, changes in soil moisture that accompany flash drought can cause extensive damage to agriculture, economies, and ecosystem goods and services.
Is this something they have recently started predicting or reporting on, or just I haven’t lived in an area that is prone to these. I always thought of drought as a slow moving disaster, not a fast moving flash sort of thing.
So reading further down the page:
Flash drought occurs more often than many people realize and can cause major impacts. Significant negative impacts to the agricultural sector have been better documented than impacts to other sectors and the environment. Flash drought has occurred in the southeastern United States as recently as the fall of 2019. In a widespread flash drought across the central U.S. during the summer of 2012, damages in the central Great Plains were estimated to be in excess of $30 billion.
Although most flash droughts do not persist to become prolonged drought, in one study, 5 to 10 percent of flash droughts transitioned to the highest drought category given by the U.S. Drought Monitor: Exceptional Drought, or D4 (Christian et al. 2019).
So sounds like it is something that I just haven’t heard of before, but sounds like one of the things that likely will occur more often.
Here is some local news about NC and our flash drought. www.wcnc.com/…
Every Thursday, the U.S. Drought Monitor issues a map that updates the drought status for each state. North Carolina and South Carolina, for the second week in a row, have seen drastic increases in dry to drought conditions across the state.
This means the Carolinas are officially under a flash drought.
So we need July to not just be normal, but for both North and South Carolina to have a wetter than normal July and for it to be consistently wet so 5-6 inches of rain in several soaking storms rather than all at once, or really heavy down burst that run off before they can soak in.