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

干旱会在世界各地造成巨大的经济、社会、环境和农业影响。它们发生在总面积和持续时间的广泛范围内。突如其来的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测工具构成了挑战。它们的快速发展与陆地和大气之间的联系联系在一起，这可能会使陆地表面更加干燥，但人们对这些反馈以及发生闪电干旱的条件知之甚少。该项目力求更好地了解陆地-大气相互作用导致干旱迅速加剧的条件，以及如何利用观测准确地描述这些条件。该项目将开发一个数据库，捕捉缓慢发展的和闪光干旱事件，并将调查衡量标准，以评估土地和大气之间的耦合，以提高我们对闪光干旱发展的理解。这些研究任务将增加我们对闪旱过程和特征及其与大规模干旱的关系的理解，这将有助于回答闪旱是否真的是一种单独的干旱类别。通过在詹姆斯·麦迪逊大学(James Madison University)进行的研究，该项目还将培训本科生环境数据科学方面的本科生，包括数据分析和可视化。詹姆斯麦迪逊大学是一家新兴研究机构，主要招收本科生。该项目将为综合科技计划的学生提供顶石项目的机会，让他们将系统分析技能应用于与社会相关的干旱主题。该项目由气候与大型动力学计划和大气与地球空间科学部共同资助，旨在支持各种机构提高研究能力、能力和基础设施的项目，如地球观测组织拥抱DCL所述。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.