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

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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.