Food security will rely increasingly on the release of cultivars with consistent high yield stability and improved resilience to drought, particularly in vulnerable arid regions where climatic change is expected to be exacerbated. Accurate and costeffective field-based high-throughput phenotyping platforms (HTPPs) will facilitate the screening of large populations for the identification of meaningful drought-adaptive traits. The HTPPs will need sensors to identify relevant traits where an integrative signal, such as photosynthesis, may serve as a good selection parameter for crop performance. Most recently the light-induced fluorescence transient (LIFT) sensor has been shown to be a valuable tool to provide active chlorophyll fluorescence (ChlF) measurements from 0.6 m distance for rapid and non-invasive characterisation of photosynthetic traits, such as the operating efficiency of photosystem II (Fq’/Fm’) and two novel parameters, Fr1’/Fq’ and Fr2’/Fq’, associated with the reoxidation efficiency of the primary electron acceptor in photosystem II (QA) at 0.65 ms and 120 ms, respectively, also known as the relaxation phase of ChlF. The LIFT instrument is also implemented with a built-in spectrometer for acquiring proximal reflectance spectra in the range from 400-800 nm. During March 2018, the LIFT sensor was mounted on a manually pushed cart to measure over 16 days a large panel of 252 elite accessions of durum wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. durum) subjected to a progressive drought stress initiated at flowering time in a replicated field trial in Maricopa, Arizona, USA, a semiarid desert environment. Increased severity of drought stress had an effect on all three photosynthetic traits, and significant phenotypic variation over time was observed across genotypes. As an overall trend, Fq’/Fm’ progressively decreased by 23.6%, while ChlF relaxation kinetics at 0.65 ms and 120 ms gradually increased by 8.7% and 1.7%, respectively. A high broad-sense heritability (H2), or more conservatively the repeatability, for Fq’/Fm’, Fr1’/Fq’ and Fr2’/Fq’ was observed (H2 = 0.70, 0.78 and 0.78, respectively). Moreover, the estimation of the best linear unbiased predictor (BLUP) for total dry biomass production, used as a proxy trait for yield, was fairly correlated with the BLUPs for both phases of ChlF, induction (Fq’/Fm’; r = 0.44, p-value < 0.001) and relaxation (Fr1,2’/Fq’; r = -0.36, p-value < 0.001), but only slightly correlated with the BLUP for the relative change in leaf relative water content (ΔRWC; r = -0.16, p-value = 0.0092). Taken together, these photosynthetic traits derived by the LIFT instrument may help prospect droughtadaptive traits in crops.