Hydroclimatic extremes are increasingly recognized as interconnected environmental and societal hazard than isolated episodes of water availability and scarcity. Their impacts can propagate through hydrological systems and ecosystems, alter water availability and quality, affect agricultural productivity and influence human health and well-being. This session will explore the mechanisms and cascading pathways through which drought and related hydroclimatic extremes generate risks across water, ecosystems, and society.
The session will bring together emerging approaches for understanding and characterizing different forms of drought, including long-term conventional droughts- meteorological, Agricultural, Hydrological, Ecological, and Socio-economic droughts as well as rapidly developing Flash Droughts and their potential transitions to flood conditions. Contributions addressing drought characteristics, drought-to-flood transitions, underlying drivers and mechanisms, detection and identification techniques, monitoring and prediction, and changes under future climate change are particularly encouraged.
This session welcomes studies investigating the impacts of drought and associated hydroclimatic extremes on water resources and water quality, ecosystems, agricultural productivity, and human health, as well as their interactions, compound effects and cascading risks. Studies focusing on drought dynamics and impacts in data-scarce regions are particularly encouraged. Interdisciplinary research employing remote sensing observations, modelling, artificial intelligence, and other emerging methodologies, including assessments of drought and drought-to-flood transitions under climate change and future projections.
By bringing together researchers from climate science, natural hazards, hydrology, environmental sciences, ecology, agriculture, and health, the session aims to advance an integrated understanding of drought dynamics, rapid hydroclimatic transitions, cascading impacts, and associated risks. It further seeks to foster advances in monitoring, prediction, early warning, adaptation, and resilience to evolving hydroclimatic extremes.