Flash Drought Virtual Workshop

To prepare for a robust and productive discussion, we ask you to complete the following homework assignments.

1. Flash Drought Survey

You should have received an email with a link to a National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) survey on flash drought. This short survey is designed to help us better understand how flash drought is perceived by drought managers and decision makers as well as within the research community.  Results will be used to inform discussions at the upcoming workshop, and to help focus flash drought research and tool development to support drought early warning. If you have not already participated in this survey, please do so.

NDMC Flash Drought Survey  (Survey has been closed.)

2. Flash Drought Definitions Literature Review

One of the objectives of the upcoming workshop is to strive for agreement on a basic set of principles or standards to which definitions of flash drought should adhere, and to categorize, as much as possible, “most useful” flash drought concepts by sector, region, and application.

a. NIDIS has prepared a literature review of the different definitions of the term “flash drought,” from its first uses in 2002 up through the end of July 2020. Please read this document before the workshop.

NIDIS Flash Drought Literature Review (PDF)

b. As an optional exercise, we invite you to share your thoughts/opinions on the various flash drought definitions ahead of the workshop in the following spreadsheet.

Please return the completed spreadsheet to joel.lisonbee@noaa.gov. We will use the consolidated comments as a baseline to begin our discussions at the workshop. Please indicate if you’d prefer your submission to remain anonymous. The deadline for feedback is:  November 13, 2020.

NIDIS Flash Drought Definitions - ProCon Assessment (Excel)

c. A final note: In preparing the literature review, we made every effort to be as thorough and objective as possible. We apologize in advance for any mis-representations or omissions. If we mis-represented your paper in this review please let us know, and we will make the correction immediately.