Climate change is making droughts faster and more furious, especially a specific fast-developing heat-driven kind that catch farmers by surprise, a new study found.
The study in Thursday’s journal Science found droughts in general are being triggered faster. But it also showed that a special and particularly nasty sudden kind — called “flash droughts” by experts — is casting an ever bigger crop-killing footprint.
“Because it occurs very, very fast people started to focus on this new phenomenon,” said study lead author Xing Yuan, dean of the School of Hydrology and Water Resources at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in China. “For the 2012 drought, actually the drought just developed in a very severe condition just within a month.”
Yuan, Otkin and their research team looked back at droughts, how fast they occurred and what kind they were, across the globe since 1951 and found flash droughts are happening more often in nearly three-quarters of the climate regions of the world. They also found droughts of all kinds happening faster.
By definition, flash droughts – because they result from low soil moisture levels – are especially bad for agriculture, experts said.
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