The 2018-2020 multi-year drought sets a new benchmark in Europe

Abstract

<p>During the period 2018-2020, Europe experienced a series of hot and dry weather conditions with significant socioeconomic and environmental consequences. Yet, the extremity of these multi-year dry conditions is not recognized. Here, we provide a comprehensive spatio-temporal assessment of the drought hazard over Europe by benchmarking past exceptional events during the period from 1766-2020. We identified the 2018-20 drought event as a new benchmark having an unprecedented intensity that persisted for more than two years, exhibiting a mean areal coverage of 35.6% and an average duration of 12.2 months. What makes this event truly exceptional compared with past events is its near-surface air temperature anomaly reaching +2.8 K, which constitutes further evidence that the ongoing global warming is exacerbating present drought events. Our analysis shows that exceptional agricultural droughts enhanced by record-breaking near-surface air temperature anomalies have a significant impact (decline) on major crop yields (wheat, grain maize, and barley) across the European countries.  Furthermore, future events based on climate model simulations (CMIP5) suggest that Europe should be prepared for events of comparable intensity as the 2018-2020 event but with durations longer than any of those experienced in the last 250 years. Soil moisture drought projections synthesized in this study, even under a moderate emission scenario, indicate that decision-makers in Europe should be prepared for drought events of comparable intensity in future. Thus, the 2018--20 drought event could be considered as a wake-up call on agricultural policies. In this study, we compared and contrasted this event with earlier events of similar magnitudes and showed the role of increasing temperature rises. </p><p>DOI of dataset: https://zenodo.org/record/5801249</p><p>Reference: </p><p>Rakovec, O., Samaniego, L., Hari, V., Markonis, Y., Moravec, V., Thober, S., Hanel, M., Kumar, R. (2022). The 2018-20 multi-year drought sets a new benchmark in Europe. <em>Under Review, resubmitted version</em></p><p> </p>

Text-mining uncovers the unique dynamics of socio-economic impacts during multi-year drought

“…To this end, we only consider observations from years with severe drought impacts. These were selected based on previous studies (Peña-Angulo et al, 2022;Tijdeman et al, 2022;Rakovec et al, 2022) and the annual magnitude of the DIS. Specifically, 115 we focused on the droughts of 2003, 2015, and the 2018-2022 multi-year drought period.…”

“…The increasing incidence of multi-year drought periods in several regions worldwide (Rakovec et al, 2022;Moravec et 50 al., 2021;Fischer et al, 2021) underscores the need to comprehend how these extended drought events impact society.…”

“…An intuitive example of the effect of drought duration is the dieback of trees in Australian and California forests due to the extended and intense droughts (Stephenson et al, 2018;Matusick et al, 2018). Therefore, research on the distinct spatio-temporal impact patterns during multi-year droughts is 55 needed for designing and implementing robust adaptation measures (Liguori et al, 2021;Rakovec et al, 2022).…”

“…In this paper, we study the spatio-temporal patterns of reported socio-economic drought impacts of both multi-year and 65 single-year drought periods in Germany from 2000 to 2022. Germany is selected as a case study because of its recent history of significant droughts (2003,2015,(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021)(2022) with widespread impacts on agriculture, forestry, livestock, and waterways navigation, among others (Peña-Angulo et al, 2022;Rakovec et al, 2022;Tijdeman et al, 2022;de Brito et al, 2020). The assessment of reported impacts supports a focal point on their human perception.…”

“…The assessment of reported impacts supports a focal point on their human perception. Specifically, we focus on the multi-year drought period between 2018-2022, which is considered a new benchmark in terms of duration and 70 intensity (Rakovec et al, 2022). With this, we aim to understand (a) how single-year and multi-year drought events differ,…”