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Natural hazards in Australia: droughts

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Abstract

Droughts are a recurrent and natural part of the Australian hydroclimate, with evidence of drought dating back thousands of years. However, our ability to monitor, attribute, forecast and manage drought is exposed as insufficient whenever a drought occurs. This paper summarises what is known about drought hazard, as opposed to the impacts of drought, in Australia and finds that, unlike other hydroclimatic hazards, we currently have very limited ability to tell when a drought will begin or end. Understanding, defining, monitoring, forecasting and managing drought is also complex due to the variety of temporal and spatial scales at which drought occurs and the diverse direct and indirect causes and consequences of drought. We argue that to improve understanding and management of drought, three key research challenges should be targeted: (1) defining and monitoring drought characteristics (i.e. frequency, start, duration, magnitude, and spatial extent) to remove confusion between drought causes, impacts and risks and better distinguish between drought, aridity, and water scarcity due to over-extractions; (2) documenting historical (instrumental and pre-instrumental) variation in drought to better understand baseline drought characteristics, enable more rigorous identification and attribution of drought events or trends, inform/evaluate hydrological and climate modelling activities and give insights into possible future drought scenarios; (3) improving the prediction and projection of drought characteristics with seasonal to multidecadal lead times and including more realistic modelling of the multiple factors that cause (or contribute to) drought so that the impacts of natural variability and anthropogenic climate change are accounted for and the reliability of long-term drought projections increases.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was a result of collaboration through the working group ‘Trends and Extremes’ as part of the Australian Water and Energy Exchanges Initiative (OzEWEX, www.ozewex.org). J. Evans was supported through Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship FT110100576. A. van Dijk was supported through ARC Discovery Project DP40103679. S. Westra and F. Johnson were supported through ARC Discovery Project DP150100411. J. Tyler was supported through ARC Discovery Project DP140104093. C. Barr was supported by ARC Discovery Project DP150103875. B. Sivakumar was supported through ARC Future Fellowship FT110100328.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Water, Climate and Land (CWCL), Faculty of Science and IT, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia

    Anthony S. Kiem

  2. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Fiona Johnson, Fitsum Woldemeskel, Bellie Sivakumar & Raj Mehrotra

  3. School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Seth Westra & Mark Thyer

  4. Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Albert van Dijk

  5. Climate Change Research Centre and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Jason P. Evans

  6. School of Plant Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

    Alison O’Donnell & Alexandra Rouillard

  7. Department of Geography, Environment and Population, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Cameron Barr

  8. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Jonathan Tyler

  9. Sprigg Geobiology Centre, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Jonathan Tyler

  10. Environment and Research, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia

    Doerte Jakob

  11. Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, University of California, Davis, USA

    Bellie Sivakumar

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  1. Anthony S. Kiem
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  2. Fiona Johnson
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  3. Seth Westra
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  8. Cameron Barr
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  9. Jonathan Tyler
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anthony S. Kiem.

Additional information

This article is part of a Special Issue on “The effect of historical and future climate changes on natural hazards in Australia” edited by Seth Westra, Chris White and Anthony Kiem.

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Kiem, A.S., Johnson, F., Westra, S. et al. Natural hazards in Australia: droughts. Climatic Change 139, 37–54 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1798-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1798-7

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