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

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. 

DOI of dataset: https://zenodo.org/record/5801249

Reference: 

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. Under Review, resubmitted version