Multi-year prediction of European summer drought conditions for the agricultural sector

Balakrishnan Solaraju-Murali,Louis-Philippe Caron,Francisco J Doblas-Reyes,Nube Gonzalez-Reviriego

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ab5043

Abstract

Decadal climate prediction, where climate models are initialized with the contemporaneous state of the Earth system and run for a decade into the future, represents a new source of near-term climate information to better inform decisions and policies across key climate-sensitive sectors. This paper illustrates the potential usefulness of such predictions for building a climate service for agricultural needs. In particular, we assess the forecast quality of multi-model climate predictions in estimating two user-relevant drought indices, Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), at multi-annual timescales during European summer. We obtain high skill for predicting five-year average (forecast years 1–5) SPEI across Southern Europe, while for the same forecast period SPI exhibits high and significant skill over Scandinavia and its surrounding regions. In addition, an assessment of the added value of initialized decadal climate information with respect to standard uninitialized climate projections is presented. The model initialization improves the forecast skill over Central Europe, the Balkan region and Southern Scandinavia. Most of the increased skill found with initialization seems to be due to the climate forecast systems ability to improve the extended summer precipitation and potential evapotranspiration forecast, as well as their ability to adequately represent the observed effects of these climate variables on the drought indices.

Highlights

Europe has experienced a series of extreme summer droughts since the beginning of the 21st century (Spinoni et al 2019)
Most of the increased skill found with initialization seems to be due to the climate forecast systems ability to improve the extended summer precipitation and potential evapotranspiration forecast, as well as their ability to adequately represent the observed effects of these climate variables on the drought indices
This work explores the ability of initialized decadal forecast systems at predicting drought conditions over Europe, an important first step in determining whether these products can provide useful, and actionable, information to stakeholders in the agricultural sector, a sector that has been identified as one of the most vulnerable to climate-related risks (Bruno Soares et al 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Europe has experienced a series of extreme summer droughts since the beginning of the 21st century (Spinoni et al 2019). The year 2018 was characterized by one of the worst droughts recorded in Europe, over the Northern part of the continent. This event has been identified as the sixth in a series of extreme summer drought that began in 2003 with heat waves across the entire European continent (Fink et al 2004). Because the impact of severe drought is expected to increase over the upcoming decades due to anthropogenic climate change (Füssel et al 2017, Spinoni et al 2018), there is a need for effective planning and adaptive actions to reduce the impact and the amount of related losses at all timescales relevant to decision-makers. There has been a growing demand amongst stakeholders in the agricultural sector to gather, assess and tailor climate sources that can provide practical and actionable information (Bruno Soares et al 2018), in particular at the multi-annual timescale

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Conclusion