Collaborative Research: Uncovering the Role of Land-Atmosphere Feedbacks on Flash Drought Intensification, Severity, and Expansion

干旱会对世界各地的经济、社会、环境和农业造成巨大影响。它们发生在广泛的总面积和持续时间。突发性干旱在数周的时间内迅速加剧，对无法捕捉快速变化的传统干旱监测和预报工具构成挑战。它们的快速发展与陆地和大气之间的联系有关，这种联系可以使陆地表面更快地干燥，但是这些反馈和发生突发性干旱的条件知之甚少。该项目旨在更好地了解陆地-大气相互作用导致干旱迅速加剧的条件，以及如何利用观测来准确描述这些条件。该项目将建立一个数据库，捕捉缓慢发展和突发性干旱事件，并将调查评估陆地和大气之间耦合的指标，以提高我们对突发性干旱发展的理解。研究任务将增加我们对突发性干旱过程和特征的理解，以及它们与大规模干旱的关系，这将有助于回答突发性干旱是否确实是一种单独的干旱类型。詹姆斯麦迪逊大学是一所以本科生为主的新兴研究机构，通过在该校进行的研究，该项目还将培养本科生在环境数据科学方面的知识，包括数据分析和可视化。该项目将为综合科学与技术项目的学生提供机会，使他们能够将系统分析技能应用于干旱的社会相关主题。将开发课程教材，将与干旱有关的材料带入大学课堂。该项目由气候与大规模动力学项目和大气与地球空间科学部联合资助，以支持在各种机构类型中提高研究能力、能力和基础设施的项目，如GEO EMBRACE DCL所述。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Droughts can lead to massive economic, social, environmental, and agricultural impacts around the world. They occur across a wide range of total areas and duration. Flash droughts, which rapidly intensify over multi-week time periods, pose challenges for traditional drought monitoring and forecasting tools that are unable to capture rapid changes. Their rapid development has been linked to connections between the land and atmosphere that can make the land surface dry even faster, but these feedbacks and the conditions under which flash droughts occur are poorly understood. This project seeks to better understand the conditions in which land-atmosphere interactions contribute to rapid drought intensification and ways observations can be used to accurately describe these conditions. This project will develop a database that captures both slowly developing and flash drought events and will investigate metrics to assess coupling between the land and atmosphere to improve our understanding of flash drought development. The research tasks will increase our understanding of flash drought processes and characteristics, and their relationship to large-scale droughts, which will help answer whether flash droughts indeed present a separate class of drought. Through research conducted at James Madison University, an emerging research institution with primarily undergraduate students, this project will also train undergraduate students in environmental data science, including data analysis and visualization. The project will provide opportunities for capstone projects for students in the Integrated Science and Technology program to apply their systems analysis skills to the socially relevant topic of drought. Course materials will be developed to bring drought related materials into the university classroom.This project is jointly funded by the Climate and Large-Scale Dynamics Program and Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences to support projects that increase research capabilities, capacity and infrastructure at a wide variety of institution types, as outlined in the GEO EMBRACE DCL.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.