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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #413737
Research Project: From Field to Watershed: Enhancing Water Quality and Management in Agroecosystems through Remote Sensing, Ground Measurements, and Integrative Modeling

Location: Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory

Title: A global flash drought inventory based on soil moisture volatility

Author
item OSMAN, M - Johns Hopkins University
item ZAITCHIK, B - Johns Hopkins University
item OTKIN, J - University Of Wisconsin
item Anderson, Martha

Submitted to: Nature Scientific Reports
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/21/2024
Publication Date: 9/4/2024
Citation: Osman, M., Zaitchik, B.F., Otkin, J., Anderson, M.C. 2024. A global flash drought inventory based on soil moisture volatility. Nature Scientific Reports. 11/965. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03809-9.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03809-9

Interpretive Summary: The phenomenon of rapid onset “flash drought” events has gained significant attention in the past decade due to their sudden impact on ecosystems, agriculture, and water resources. These droughts can develop within weeks, leaving little time for effective mitigation and response. Traditional drought indices often fail to capture the swift nature and immediate impacts of these events, leading to a gap in effective monitoring and prediction. To enable development of more rigorous and timely flash drought identification tools, we have developed a global inventory of flash drought events based on the Soil Moisture Volatility Index (SMVI), which is based on rapid decreases in root-zone soil moisture – in this case derived from a global land-surface model. The archive covers the period 1990 to 2021, and along with flash drought severity and duration includes a number of meteorological variables that will be useful in understanding the causes of the rapid moisture decline, including rainfall, vapor pressure deficit, wind, and sunshine. This inventory can serve as a baseline for developing improved detection tools that can better inform effective responses to flash drought at local to global scales.

Technical Abstract: Flash droughts, characterized by their rapid onset and development, present significant challenges to agriculture and climate mitigation strategies. Operational drought monitoring systems, most of which are based on the precipitation, soil moisture deficits or temperature anomalies, often fall short in timely detection of these events, underscoring the need for customized flash drought identification and monitoring indices that account for the rapidity of flash drought onset. Recognizing this need, this paper introduces a global flash drought inventory derived using the Soil Moisture Volatility Index (SMVI). Our work expands the application of the SMVI methodology, previously focused on the United States, to a global scale, providing a tool for understanding and predicting these rapidly developing drought phenomena. The dataset encompasses detailed event characteristics, including onset, duration, and severity, across diverse climate zones. By integrating atmospheric variables through their impact on soil moisture, the inventory offers a platform for analyzing the drivers and impacts of flash droughts, and serves as a large, consistent dataset for use in training and evaluating flash drought prediction models.