School of Hydrology and Water Resources, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, Jiangsu, China.
Key Laboratory of Regional Climate-Environment for Temperate East Asia (RCE-TEA), Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China.
Nat Commun. 2019 Oct 11;10(1):4661. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-12692-7.
Flash droughts refer to a type of droughts that have rapid intensification without sufficient early warning. To date, how will the flash drought risk change in a warming future climate remains unknown due to a diversity of flash drought definition, unclear role of anthropogenic fingerprints, and uncertain socioeconomic development. Here we propose a new method for explicitly characterizing flash drought events, and find that the exposure risk over China will increase by about 23% ± 11% during the middle of this century under a socioeconomic scenario with medium challenge. Optimal fingerprinting shows that anthropogenic climate change induced by the increased greenhouse gas concentrations accounts for 77% ± 26% of the upward trend of flash drought frequency, and population increase is also an important factor for enhancing the exposure risk of flash drought over southernmost humid regions. Our results suggest that the traditional drought-prone regions would expand given the human-induced intensification of flash drought risk.
闪蒸干旱是指一种没有足够早期预警就迅速加剧的干旱类型。迄今为止，由于闪蒸干旱定义的多样性、人为影响的不明确作用以及不确定的社会经济发展，在变暖的未来气候下，闪蒸干旱风险将如何变化仍然未知。在这里，我们提出了一种新的方法来明确表征闪蒸干旱事件，并发现，在具有中等挑战的社会经济情景下，到本世纪中叶，中国的暴露风险将增加约 23%±11%。最优指纹识别表明，由温室气体浓度增加引起的人为气候变化占闪蒸干旱频率上升趋势的 77%±26%，人口增长也是增强闪蒸干旱对最南部湿润地区暴露风险的一个重要因素。我们的研究结果表明，由于人为引发的闪蒸干旱风险加剧，传统的干旱频发地区将会扩大。
