The 1531-1540 dry summers in Europe - Identifying potential drivers of decadal dry spells using climate reconstructions and ensemble simulations of the past 600 years

The decade 1531-1540 was characterized by a high number of dry summer episodes making it the driest summer decade of the past 500 years in some areas of Central Europe. In addition to established climate reconstructions, we use the ModE-RA (Modern Era Reanalysis) and ModE-Sim (Modern Era Simulations) data sets which provide gridded climate information of the past 600 years to analyse the summers of 1531-1540 and compare it with other decadal dry spells over Europe.

While most previous studies focus on the variability of individual drought events or multi-decadal mega droughts, our aim is to identify decadal scale dry spells similar to the 1531-1540 decade. With our three-dimensional reanalysis and the model simulations forced with observed volcanic forcings and prescribed SST we can then investigate the atmospheric and oceanic drivers of such events as well as the influence of the volcanic forcings.

Our first results show that the magnitude and distribution of observed decadal dry spells in ModE-RA is realistic and comparable to other climate reconstructions. In the ModE-Sim ensemble mean the drying signal for the 1531-1540 event is less strong but still visible. Overall, with our ongoing analysis we contribute to the evaluation of past and future decadal dry spells over Europe that are driven by both natural and anthropogenic forcings.