An appraisal of the severity of the 2022 drought and its impacts

Abstract

The summer of 2022 was particularly notable for the prolonged and extensive hot and dry conditions experienced across the UK. The resultant 2022 drought had widespread impacts and prompted much discussion about the continuing vulnerability of the UK to drought, particularly in the context of anthropogenic warming. Here, we briefly describe the evolution of the drought before focusing on the severity of rainfall, river flow, soil moisture and groundwater level deficits from summer 2022, placing the event into a historical context and addressing the impacts of the drought. We also consider whether the 2022 drought is part of a long‐term trend towards increasing drought severity.

Droughts and Media: when and what do the newspapers talk about the droughts in England?

“…CC BY 4.0 License. markedly in 2022 (Barker et al, 2024). The plot also suggested that most media coverage for major droughts coincided when the meteorological condition consisted of both positive temperature and negative precipitation anomalies (see the yellow shades).…”

“…Extracting entity names, such as frequently mentioned organization names within the sub-corpora, was also performed. and the drought in mid-2022 (Drought in Summer 2022 hereafter), which were reported as extreme droughts on the one hand by the official reports of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (i.e., Major Hydrological Events) and research papers (e.g., Barker et al, 2024), and on the other by looking at the times in which massive media coverage was accumulated in the heatmap above. At this point, we looked into the headlines and body content corresponding to the topics to further understand the context in which these droughts were represented.…”

Reply on RC1

“…July 2022 was exceptionally warm and dry in the UK, with widespread record-breaking maximum temperatures and extremely low rainfall across England (<10% of average over large parts of the south-east) (Barker et al 2024). The preceding months had also been dry, leading to river flows and reservoirs reaching exceptionally low levels across much of England and the introduction of temporary use bans by several water companies in southern England (Barker et al 2024).…”

Reply on RC2

“…July 2022 was exceptionally warm and dry in the UK, with widespread record-breaking maximum temperatures and extremely low rainfall across England (<10% of average over large parts of the south-east) (Barker et al 2024). The preceding months had also been dry, leading to river flows and reservoirs reaching exceptionally low levels across much of England and the introduction of temporary use bans by several water companies in southern England (Barker et al 2024).…”