Faster Than a Speeding Drought

FLASH DROUGHTS

Droughts Are Usually Slowly Developing Catastrophes

Sort of Slo-Mo Trainwrecks

So slow, they are hard to "see" if you are in the middle of a developing one. At least that's the case in a typical drought. "Typical" is getting harder to come by in these times of Climate Change (CC) with all the "thousand year" events happening anually and "hundred year" events happening monthly. Still, it's surprising how fast a destructive drought can develop these days. Meteorologists call them "Flash Droughts" (FD) That's a scary addition to the list of bad weather events.

Here's how they work. Heat Domes (HD) are large areas of high pressure (HP) that capture and compress hot air and park over some part of the country and just sit there getting hotter and hotter and.  Usually HP areas move along from west to east in our hemisphere, but CC has made the jet stream (JS) weird. CC is causing instability in the JS so that it doesn't move the HP, which quickly become an HD which bakes the area it's over and causes an FD, also called "rapid onset drought risk" (RODR)! 

DRAMATIC EFFECTS UNDER THE HEAT DOMES

It gets very hot, very dry, and very windy under an HD, and these big bruisers hang around much longer than a typical heat wave. Weeks sometimes. A few weeks under a HD and what do you get? VERY DRY, VERY FAST, leading to...

-- Big, Out-of-Control Wildfires. The forests and the plains get much drier much faster, so spark-boom, megafires. See the Canadian case below.

-- Sudden, drastic crop failures in unirrigated crops like wheat, barely, oats, oil seeds, hay and such.

We are used to flash floods (FF).

But FLASH DROUGHTS (FD)?

    Uh Oh...

Canadian story excerpt:

Quebec suffered from a relatively new phenomenon known as "flash drought."

"That area was not in drought," said Jain. "It transitioned to drought very, very quickly."

The paper calls flash drought "an emerging process we are only beginning to understand."

The paper finds the long periods of hot and dry weather were worsened by high-pressure zones that blocked the normal movement of air normally driven by the jet stream, a high-altitude river of air circling the planet that drives much of Earth's weather. Most places in Canada experience an average of 14 days under such immobile high-pressure systems. In 2023, areas that suffered the worst fires had as many as 60.

As well, may of those so-called "blocking events" in the West occurred early in the season, hastening mountain snowmelt and increasing the amount of time forests were vulnerable to fire.

Another reason CLIMATE CHANGE SUCKS.

 Oh, stay hydrated out there.