Rapid droughts coming on faster over majority of world. Will it impact India?

The abrupt dry spells are replacing the relatively slower ones that are harder to predict, leading to further difficulties in their management.

Rapid onsets of drought, also called flash droughts, have been occurring frequently with greater speed in many parts of the world as a result of climate change, according to a new study. These abrupt dry spells are replacing the relatively slower ones that are harder to predict, leading to further difficulties in their management.

The study was conducted by analysing soil moisture data from around the world from 1951 to 2014.(AP)

The study, which was published in Science, quoted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Extreme Events data and said a significant transition towards flash droughts have been recorded over 74% of the global regions in last 64 years. It further noted that these droughts occurred more often than slower ones over tropical regions including India, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and the Amazon basin. However, ‘even for slow droughts, the onset speed has been increasing', according to lead author of the study Xing Yuan, a hydrologist at China's Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology.

The study was conducted by analysing soil moisture data from around the world from 1951 to 2014. Then they distinguished between the rate at which soils were getting dried up during the initial periods of the droughts' onset and later calculated them.

Researchers pointed out that human-induced climate change has remained the major cause for this trend around the globe. Heat waves during these flash droughts become more extreme than during seasonal or interannual droughts, which even intensifies the dry spells.

These flash droughts are expected to rise further as the globe continues to warm, causing the water from soil and plants to evaporate into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, these flash droughts cannot be predicted as their onset cannot be captured with the kind of technology used for the monitoring system.