Improved Understanding of Flash Drought from a Comparative Analysis of Drought with Different Intensification Rates

The rapid intensification of drought, commonly known as flash drought, has recently drawn widespread attention from researchers. However, how the characteristics and drivers, as well as the ecological impacts of rapidly intensified droughts, differ from those of slowly intensified ones still remains unclear over the globe. To this end, we defined three types of droughts based on the root zone soil moisture (RZSM) decline rates, flash droughts, general droughts, and creep droughts, and then implemented a comparative analysis between them across the globe and the 26 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Extremes (IPCC-SREX) regions. The ensemble of RZSM from multiple reanalysis datasets was used to reduce the uncertainties. According to the frequency analysis, our findings suggest that flash droughts contributed to the majority of drought events during 1980–2019, indicating the prevalence of rapid transition from an energy-limited to a water-limited condition in most of the regions. The comparative results of vegetation responses show that flash droughts are more likely to happen in the growing season, leading to faster but relatively minor vegetation deterioration compared to the slowly intensified ones. By analyzing the precipitation and temperature anomalies in the month of drought onset, we found the role of temperature (precipitation) on drought intensification can be generalized as the warmer (drier) the climate is or the faster the drought intensifies, but the main driving forces vary by region. Unlike temperature dominating in midwestern Eurasia and northern high latitudes, precipitation plays a prominent role in the monsoon regions. However, the temperature is expected to be the decisive driver in the warming future, given its monotonically increased contribution over the past four decades.