Physical mechanisms of meteorological drought development, intensification and termination: an Australian review
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2025
Authors
Holgate, C.M.
Falster, G.M.
Gillett, Z.E.
Goswami, P.
Grant, M.O.
Hobeichi, S.
Hoffmann, D.
Jiang, X.
Jin, C.
Lu, X.
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Communications Earth & Environment, 2025; 6(1):220-1-220-14
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We synthesise advances in the understanding of the physical processes that play a role in developing, intensifying, and terminatingmeteorological droughts.We focus on Australia, where new understanding of drought drivers across different climate regimes provides insights into drought processes elsewhere in the world. Drawing on observational, climate model and machine learning-based research, we conclude that meteorological drought develops and intensifies largely through an absence of synoptic processes responsible for strong moisture transport and heavy precipitation. The subsequent presence of these synoptic processes is key to drought termination. Large-scale modes of climate variability modulate drought through teleconnections, which alter drought-determining synoptic behaviour. On local scales, land surface processes play an important role in intensifying dry conditions and propagating meteorological drought through the hydrological cycle. In the future, Australia may experience longer and more intense droughts than have been observed in the instrumental record, although confidence in drought projections remains low. We propose a research agenda to address key knowledge gaps to improve the understanding, simulation and projection of drought in Australia and around the world.
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© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s CreativeCommons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/.