With climate change and an accelerating hydrological cycle, dry/hot hydrological extremes are no longer represented by classic, slow-evolving droughts. Over the past decade, heatwaves, dry spells and flash droughts have emerged as threats producing major impacts across multiple sectors. Furthermore, their rapid development hinders our ability to forecast and mitigate.

Beyond their rapid development, their timing, intensity, preceding conditions, and locally significant vulnerabilities can worsen their impacts, including high plant mortality and crop losses, depletion of freshwater resources, wildfires, degraded air quality and ecosystem health, and even fatalities. Due to the rapid intensification, rapid response is vital, which demands improving monitoring strategies beyond the existing standards developed for slow-evolving droughts. Challenging to identify, difficult to compare across different climates and ecosystems, and driven by a complex combination of various physical processes, rapidly emerging dry/hot-extreme events are not yet well understood nor clearly defined. Consequently, there are few practical solutions for risk management and stakeholders.

This session invites novel contributions on statistical, physically based, remote sensing-based, and qualitative methods for improving our physical understanding, monitoring, modelling, predicting, and assessment of environmental, social, and economic impacts of rapidly emerging dry/hot-extremes. Contributions that discuss and propose definitions for different types of rapidly emerging dry/hot-extremes, and investigate their changes, trends, and impacts are also invited. Contributions that investigate the atmospheric drivers and land-atmosphere feedback loops are highly encouraged. We encourage submissions from atmospheric sciences, hydrometeorology, hydrology, social sciences, and inter- and trans-disciplinary studies. Case studies, large-sample studies, statistical and time series analyses and machine-learning applications, socio-hydrology approaches, and citizen science experiences are welcome. Note that submissions that do not relate specifically to flash droughts, dry spells or other rapidly emerging droughts will be transferred into more relevant sessions. Submissions from early career researchers and diverse backgrounds are especially encouraged.