Project team:
- Vittal Hari, Rohini Kumar, Stephan Thober, Luis Samaniego, and Oldrich Rakovec
- Yannis Markonis, Sadaf Rani, Jan Kysely, Petr Maca, and Martin Hanel
Project news/outreach:
Our new paper on "On the curious case of the recent decade, mid-spring precipitation deficit in central Europe" was published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. UFZ press-release AWI press-release
Altmetric summary:
Our paper on "Increased future occurrences of the exceptional 2018–2019 Central European drought under global warming" was published in Scientific reports. Nature Research highlights. UFZ press-release.
Altmetric summary:
Selected news articles: The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, The Daily Mail, FOCUS Online, MDR, ORF, France24, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, National Geographic
Example of soil moisture deficit
This bilateral/joint German (DFG) - Czech (GACR) project XEROS (meaning 'dry' in Greek) represents a unique opportunity of bringing together two research groups of complementary scientific knowledge. The German-based team (CHS @UFZ) focus on understanding and modelling the complex interaction of land-surface hydrologic processes and their spatial and temporal variability at meso- to macro-scales. The Czech-based team (CULS) have strong scientific background in statistical analysis of hydrologic and climate variability.
Project objectives
The overarching goal of this project is to address the following research questions:
- What is the extremity of the recent European drought events compared to the 500-year benchmark period?
- How does the space-time variability of drought evolution change over time?
- How do the large-scale atmospheric characteristics, responsible to generate land-surface droughts, co-evolve? How can we enhance the reliability of future hydro-climatic projections?
Work packages
- WP-1a: Historical reconstruction of climate forcing data to allow hydrologic simulations at finer spatial and temporal resolution. [led by the CULS team]
- WP-1b: Multi-model hydrologic simulations of key hydrologic variables [led by the UFZ team]
- WP-2a: Historical characterisation of large scale drought events [led jointly by the UFZ and CULS teams].
- WP-2b: Improved understanding on genesis of the large scale drought events [led by the CULS team]
- WP-3: Enhancing the reliability of future hydro-climatic projections [led by the UFZ team]
- Ionita, M., Nagavciuc, V., Kumar, R. and Rakovec, O. (2020) On the curious case of the recent decade, mid-spring precipitation deficit in central Europe. npj Clim Atmos Sci 3, 49
- Hari, V., Rakovec, O., Markonis, Y., Hanel, M., & Kumar, R. (2020). Increased future occurrences of the exceptional 2018–2019 Central European drought under global warming. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 1-10
- Moravec, V., Markonis, Y., Rakovec, O., Kumar, R., Hanel, M., (2019): A 250‐year European drought inventory derived from ensemble hydrologic modeling, Geophys. Res. Lett. 46 (11), 5909 - 5917
- Hanel, M., Rakovec, O., Markonis, Y., Máca, P., Samaniego, L., Kyselý, J., Kumar, R., (2018):
Revisiting the recent European droughts from a long-term perspective, Sci. Rep. 8 , art. 9499 - Samaniego, L., Thober, S., Kumar, R., Wanders, N., Rakovec, O., Pan, M., Zink, M., Sheffield, J., Wood, E.F., Marx, A., (2018): Anthropogenic warming exacerbates European soil moisture droughts, Nat. Clim. Chang. 8 (5), 421 - 426
- Marx, A., Kumar, R., Thober, S., Rakovec, O., Wanders, N., Zink, M., Wood, E.F., Pan, M., Sheffield, J., Samaniego, L., (2018): Climate change alters low flows in Europe under global warming of 1.5, 2, and 3 °C, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 22 (2), 1017 - 1032