Abstract
Abstract. The 2018–2019 drought in north-western and central Europe caused severe damage to a wide range of sectors. It also emphasised the fact that, even in countries with temperate climates, adaptations are needed to cope with increasing future drought frequencies. A crucial component of drought management strategies is to monitor the status of groundwater resources. However, providing up-to-date assessments of regional groundwater drought development remains challenging due to the limited availability of high-quality data. This limits many studies to small selections of groundwater monitoring sites, giving an incomplete image of drought dynamics. In this study, a time series modelling-based method for data preparation was developed and applied to map the spatio-temporal development of the 2018–2019 groundwater drought in the south-eastern Netherlands, based on a large set of monitoring data. The data preparation method was evaluated for its usefulness and reliability for data validation, simulation, and regional groundwater drought assessment. The analysis showed that the 2018–2019 meteorological drought caused extreme groundwater drought throughout the south-eastern Netherlands, breaking 30-year records almost everywhere. Drought onset and duration were strongly variable in space, and higher-elevation areas suffered from severe drought well into 2020. Groundwater drought development appeared to be governed dominantly by the spatial distribution of rainfall and the landscape type. The time series modelling-based data preparation method was found to be a useful tool to enable a spatially detailed record of regional groundwater drought development. The automated time series modelling-based data validation improved the quality and quantity of useable data, although optimal validation parameters are probably context dependent. The time series simulations were generally found to be reliable; however, the use of time series simulations rather than direct measurement series can bias drought estimations, especially at a local scale, and underestimate spatial variability. Further development of time-series-based validation and simulation methods, combined with accessible and consistent monitoring data, will be valuable to enable better groundwater drought monitoring in the future.
Highlights
In the summer of 2018, a severe drought hit large parts of north-western and central Europe
The current study aims to evaluate the usefulness of a time series modelling-based data preparation method for regional analysis of groundwater drought
The application of a TSMbased method to the 2018–2019 drought in the Netherlands has provided new insights into how time series modelling (TSM) methods can be used for data validation, how reliable they are for the quantification of extreme groundwater drought situations, and how they can contribute to regional groundwater drought assessments
Summary
In the summer of 2018, a severe drought hit large parts of north-western and central Europe. Low precipitation coincided with high temperatures, both breaking multidecadal records in many places (see Bakke et al, 2020; Philip et al, 2020; Toreti et al, 2019). Recurring drought in summer 2019 and early 2020 worsened the situation in large parts of the area. The kind of “hot drought” that occurred in 2018–2019 is expected to become more frequent in the future in central and northern Europe (Philip et al, 2020; Toreti et al, 2019).
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