Spatio-temporal characteristics of streamflow drought change over Europe

Europe was plagued by severe drought events over the first decades of the 21st century, most notably in the years 2003, 2015, and 2018. Meteorological drought conditions affected large parts of the continent, which in turn led to widespread streamflow deficits that affected many rivers simultaneously. Understanding such spatio-temporal patterns of streamflow droughts is important for drought relief, but few studies have investigated in detail how such spatio-temporal drought characteristics change in space and time. In this study, we set up the PCR-GLOBWB global hydrological model over Europe at a hyper-resolution of 30 arcsec (approx. 1km) and ran it for the period 1980-2019. We use the resulting model simulations to analyse how spatio-temporal characteristics of streamflow droughts vary between different river basins in Europe. Furthermore, we apply trend analyses to understand how such spatial characteristics of droughts change over time. Our preliminary results suggest distinct patterns in spatio-temporal characteristics of streamflow droughts, which vary over the continent and are affected by changing hydro-meteorological conditions.