How Unusual Is the 2022 European Compound Drought and Heatwave Event?

Abstract

The 2022 Compound Drought and Heatwave (CDHW) caused widespread crop damage, water shortages, and wildfires across Europe. Our study analyzed this event’s severity and return period (RP) and compared it with past mega CDHWs in Europe. The hardest‐hit areas were Iberian Peninsula, France, and Italy, where temperatures exceeded 2.5°C above normal, and severe droughts persisted from May to August. Using a Bayesian approach, we estimated the RP for the 2022 CDHW event, which was unprecedented in Northern Italy, Iberian Peninsula, and western parts of France, with RPs of 354, 420, and 280 years, respectively. The reduced soil moisture due to precipitation deficits and high temperatures contributed to the persistence and severity of drought, creating a positive feedback loop where dry soils led to even drier conditions. In light of our findings, it is evident that global warming poses increased risks of severe CDHW events, which are likely to increase.

Probabilistic Assessment of Global Drought Recovery and Its Response to Precipitation Changes

“…Our framework offers a simple and efficient approach for assessing drought recovery probability. By employing Vine Copula, our approach can be easily extended to even higher dimensions, enabling the recovery analysis of compound extremes involving multiple types of events, such as droughts and heatwaves (Tripathy et al., 2023; Tripathy & Mishra, 2023) or drought‐to‐flood seesaw events (He & Sheffield, 2020). Nonetheless, it should be noted that uncertainties might be associated with our results, as this study only focuses on the most extreme droughts whose magnitude falls in the tail part of the probability density distribution.…”

Weather, Vol. 78, no. 12, December 2023, pp. 326‐352

“…Further high temperature records were set in Finland and Estonia in August. The 2022 compound drought and heatwave event across Europe was more severe than any in at least the past 70 years (Tripathy and Mishra, 2023), but such events are projected to become much more frequent under climate change (Zhang et al, 2022;De Luca and Donat, 2023).…”

Global and regional climate in 2022

“…Severe drought and heatwave conditions were experienced widely in Western Europe and around the Mediterranean during the summer months (Tripathy and Mishra, 2023). Parts of Europe experienced summer temperature anomalies of more than 3.5 degC compared to the 1961-1990 average (Figure 10), with unusually low precipitation totals.…”

“…Further high temperature records were set in Finland and Estonia in August. The 2022 compound drought and heatwave event across Europe was more severe than any in at least the past 70 years (Tripathy and Mishra, 2023), but such events are projected to become much more frequent under climate change (Zhang et al, 2022; De Luca and Donat, 2023).…”