Can Sentinel-2 help characterize the land management effect on the impact of drought followed by heavy precipitation in European agroecosystems?

Successions of drought and extreme precipitation events are frequent compound events that pose a wide range of threats to ecosystems, whether natural or managed, and to society as a whole. The severity of such impacts depends on the intensity of the cascading hazards, the exposure and vulnerability of the affected systems. In the project ARCEME (Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Extremes and Multi-hazard Events) funded by the European Space Agency, we propose a workflow to analyse compound events fingerprints, i.e. spatially aggregated time series of indices based on small data cubes of satellite remote sensing imagery, typically 10x10 km over two years. Here, we demonstrate the workflow in some agroecosystems across Europe, selected using the WOCAT database on sustainable land management, which experienced heavy precipitation following extremely dry conditions. The compound events are detected in ERA5-Land time series of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration. We stratify the Sentinel 2-based fingerprints using land management information from the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service High Resolution Layers. The results provide insight into the effect of land management on the resilience of European agroecosystems to the impacts of drought followed by heavy precipitation.