Abstract
Abstract. Hydrological drought often gets less attention compared to meteorological drought. For water resources managers, information on hydrological drought characteristics is prerequisite for adequate drought planning and management. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse hydrological drought characteristics in the pan-European region based on past drought events from 1990 to 2017. The annual average drought duration, deficit volume, onset, termination, and intensity during drought years were calculated using daily runoff and groundwater data. All data were simulated with the LISFLOOD hydrological model (resolution 5×5 km) fed with gridded time series of observed weather data. Results based on runoff and groundwater data show that regions in Northeast to Southeast Europe, which stretched out from Poland to Bulgaria, were identified as profound regions to severe hydrological drought hazards. The most severe droughts during our study period were observed in 1992 to 1997, where on average Europe experienced drought events, which lasted up to 4 months. Long average drought durations up to 4 and 8 months in runoff and groundwater occurred in a few parts of the European regions (around 10 % area). Longer drought durations and a lower number of drought events were found in groundwater drought than in runoff, which proved that slow responding variables (groundwater) are better in showing extreme drought compared to fast responding variables (runoff). Based on our results, the water managers can better prepare for upcoming drought and foster drought adaptation actions.
Highlights
Drought by definition is a sustained and regionally-extensive period of below-average natural water availability
Those events are captured well in the hydrological drought analyses using groundwater droughts in South-West Germany obtained from the LISFLOOD SFO model output from 1991–1997, as an example (Fig. 1)
The first drought event occurred from the end of 1991 to the beginning of 1994 and the major drought event occurred from the beginning of 1996 to the end of 1998
Summary
Drought by definition is a sustained and regionally-extensive period of below-average natural water availability. The spatial and temporal characteristics of drought vary from one region to another (Tallaksen and Van Lanen, 2004). Compared to other flashy natural hazards, such as floods, flash floods, and landslides, drought events develop slower and sometimes unnoticed, but have comparable devastating impacts in terms of economy, society, and environment (Mishra and Singh, 2010). Droughts are generally classified into four categories: meteorological drought, soil moisture drought or agriculture drought, hydrological drought, and socio-economic drought (Tallaksen and Van Lanen, 2004; Mishra and Singh, 2010; Van Loon, 2015). Socio-economic drought refers to the failure of water resources systems associated with the impacts of the three aforementioned drought types
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