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Lookup NU author(s): Masoud Zeraati, Professor Hayley Fowler, Dr Colin Manning
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2026. The Author(s). Flash droughts are characterized by rapid onset and intensification, with severe impacts on agriculture and ecosystems. They often begin as meteorological droughts and, if conditions worsen, evolve into agricultural droughts. While precipitation deficit is often the primary driver, atmospheric and hydrological anomalies can exacerbate flash drought development. This study characterizes flash droughts across the Contiguous United States using remote sensing data from 2003 to 2020. A combination of satellite-derived meteorological, agricultural, and ecological variables are used to investigate large-scale flash drought development. Events are defined using root-zone soil moisture. We used the Aridity Index to assess how background aridity influences agricultural and ecological impacts. Cross-correlation and Cross Wavelet analyses are applied to examine the propagation of flash droughts from meteorological to agricultural and ecological stages. Results show that flash drought characteristics—including frequency, duration, and onset/recovery rates—are significantly influenced by landscape aridity characteristics. Precipitation is identified as the main driver across all climate regimes while Relative Humidity (RH) and Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD) also indicate early signals. Time lags between meteorological variables and Soil Moisture (SM), as well as between soil moisture and ecological variables, vary across climates. Generally, results show that ecosystems respond to flash drought after soil moisture. Solar Induced Fluorescence (SIF), a measure of ecological stress, detects flash drought onset earlier than SM, highlighting its potential for early detection and monitoring.
Author(s): Zeraati M, Farahmand A, Seager R, Fowler HJ, Madani N, Parazoo N, Manning C, White CJ, Wen Y, Mehran A, AghaKouchak A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Earth's Future
Year: 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: 3
Online publication date: 20/03/2026
Acceptance date: 20/02/2026
Date deposited: 07/04/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2328-4277
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EF007037
DOI: 10.1029/2025EF007037
Data Access Statement: The data used for this study are freely available. The precipitation data (Huffman et al., 2023) used in this study were obtained from the GPM (IMERG), version 7 (GPM_3IMERGDF). Atmospheric variables including temperature, relative humidity, and vapor pressure deficit were derived from the AIRS-only Aqua L2 Standard Physical Retrievals (AIRS project, 2019). ET and PET data were downloaded from the MODIS MOD16A2GF v061 product (Running et al., 2021). Root-zone soil moisture (RZSM) data were retrieved from the ERA5-Land reanalysis provided by the Copernicus Climate Data Store (Muñoz Sabater et al., 2019). LAI data were obtained from the MODIS MOD15A2H v061 product (Myneni et al., 2021). SIF data (CSIF v2) were downloaded from (Y. Zhang et al., 2018). GLEAM RZSM data used in this paper is from Miralles et al. (2025). NLDAS RZSM product is from Xia et al. (2014). GLDAS used in this paper is from B. Li et al. (2020).
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