Heat wave flash droughts in decline

Abstract

Flash drought is a term that was popularized during rapidly evolving droughts in the Central U.S. in 2012 that were associated with heat waves. We posit that there are two kinds of flash droughts, and we will focus on heat wave flash droughts, of which the 2012 events were typical. We find, based on an analysis of temperature observations and model-reconstructed soil moisture (SM) and evapotranspiration from 1916 to 2013, that heat wave flash droughts in the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) are most likely to occur over the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest during the growing season. We also find that the number of such events across the CONUS has been decreasing over the last century but rebounded after 2011. The long-term downward trends appear to be associated with generally increasing trends in SM resulting from increasing trends in precipitation over the areas where heat wave flash droughts are most likely to occur.