Dynamics of the Earth’s largest drought events in 1980–2025

Studying droughts as individual, evolving events rather than as a static phenomenon reveals that some droughts are highly dynamic, with shifting epicenters. To investigate the dynamics of the Earth’s largest droughts in recent decades, we used the newly developed catalog of global land drought events (GLDEs), based on estimates of root-zone soil moisture from the SoilClim model and the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM). Using density-based 3D clustering, the catalog delineates 781 GLDEs during the 1980–2025 period and evaluates their severity using an index calculated from four spatiotemporal characteristics. We analyzed the dynamics of each GLDE by tracking individual drought movements and found that some GLDEs are among the longest-lasting extreme weather phenomena, persisting for multiple years, with epicenters moving thousands of kilometers over the course of their lifespan. We found that severe drought events often experience dynamic evolution and are more prone to spatial shifts. On the other hand, less severe droughts are more often static, but in some cases, they can experience a dynamic development too. Moreover, we focused on the events with the highest severity index. In particular, we examined exceptionally severe drought events in South America (starting in 2019) and central Africa (starting in 2020), both of which were still ongoing as of December 2025, as well as a highly dynamic drought event that began in Europe in 2018 and ended in Central Asia in 2024. Our results highlight the importance of investigating drought spatial dynamics and their potential drivers, including modes of climate variability and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns.