Abstract
Since the spring 2018, a large part of Europe has been in the midst of a record-setting drought. Using long-term observations, we demonstrate that the occurrence of the 2018–2019 (consecutive) summer drought is unprecedented in the last 250 years, and its combined impact on the growing season vegetation activities is stronger compared to the 2003 European drought. Using a suite of climate model simulation outputs, we underpin the role of anthropogenic warming on exacerbating the future risk of such a consecutive drought event. Under the highest Representative Concentration Pathway, (RCP 8.5), we notice a seven-fold increase in the occurrence of the consecutive droughts, with additional 40 (pm , 5) million ha of cultivated areas being affected by such droughts, during the second half of the twenty-first century. The occurrence is significantly reduced under low and medium scenarios (RCP 2.6 and RCP 4.5), suggesting that an effective mitigation strategy could aid in reducing the risk of future consecutive droughts.
Highlights
Human-induced climate change is evident and it poses a great concern to society, primarily due to its potential to intensify extreme events around the globe[1,2]
Our analysis based on an ensemble of climate model simulations suggests a strong increase in the occurrence of such a rare event, post 2050 under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario
The frequency and the areal extent of these droughts strongly depend on the level of anthropogenic warming scenarios
Summary
2018–2019 Central European drought from the long‐term observational records. The historical reconstruction of composite 254-year long-term climatic database[22,23] indicates that the precipitation anomaly exhibits a drier than average situation during the summer months of 2018 and 2019 across the Central Europe, its intensity is not that high and there are many other years with similar range of precipitation anomalies (Fig. 1k). Consistent with the previous s tudies[8,10,41], our analysis shows that anthropogenic warming will lead to an intensification of European droughts, and to a large extent on the occurrence of 2-year droughts in the future Such events have substantial implications on many sectors including impacts on agro-phenology, crop water demand and vegetation health activities. Using the long-term historical and projected land use changes based on HYDE d atabase[42] (see Methods), we find that drought affected cropland areas across the Central Europe will be nearly doubled (by 20 ± 5 million ha) under the RCP 8.5 scenario in the second half of the Century in comparison to corresponding historical values (Fig. 3b). A similar range of benefits in reducing the potential impacts of consecutive year droughts can be expected for areas covered with pastures (Fig. 3c)—which are of high importance for sustaining livestock (i.e., grazing)
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