Beyondthesea | A research team from CIM participates in an international study on the causes of the drought preceding major wildfires in Australia

Un equipo investigador do CIM participa nun estudo internacional sobre as causas da seca que procedeu aos grandes incendios de Australia
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Their work focused on investigating moisture sources. The results have just been published in the journal ‘Science Advances’

The latest issue of Science Advances features an international study focused on analyzing the Tinderbox drought in southeastern Australia, which preceded the major wildfires in that country in late 2019 and early 2020. Among the authors of this work is Milica Stojanovic, a researcher from the Marine Research Center at the University of Vigo.

The study, titled Australia’s Tinderbox drought: an extreme natural event likely worsened by human-caused climate change, was conducted by 22 researchers “from various globally renowned institutions”. Specifically, it analyzed the characteristics and causes of the Tinderbox drought (from 2017 to 2019), which preceded the disaster of the wildfires known as the Black Summer. The Tinderbox drought, explained the researcher from CIM’s EPhysLab group, was characterized by precipitation deficits in the cold season of around -50% over three consecutive years, “something exceptionally improbable in the context of natural climate variability and that caused ecosystemic and socioeconomic damage of enormous magnitude”.

Computational simulation of moisture transport

Milica Stojanovic’s participation in this work involved investigating moisture sources for precipitation in Australia and determining their role in attributing extreme drought conditions through a Lagrangian computational simulation model of transport. “The results showed that precipitation deficits due to anthropogenic forcing were due to a reduction in moisture transport from oceanic sources in 2017, which intensified in the winter season of the following year, exacerbating the drought in 2018”, commented the CIM researcher. In addition, the accumulated precipitation deficit over the Tinderbox drought region, she added, also led to an anomalously low contribution of moisture from terrestrial sources in 2018 and 2019, intensifying the severity of the drought. These moisture deficits, as outlined in the study, were intensified by unusually high temperatures, high vapor pressure deficits, and sustained reductions in terrestrial water availability. Thus, the article published in Science Advances points out that anthropogenic forcing intensified rainfall deficits of the Tinderbox drought by around 18%.

The results of the moisture source investigation are presented in the study along with an analysis of precipitation associated with meteorological systems affecting the region, as well as the vegetative response to water stress conditions. “Its results confirmed the importance of this methodology in attributing the origin and severity of the drought phenomenon and opens the door to its use in future studies on the predictability of this phenomenon in the region”, says Milica Stojanovic.

Source: DUVI