Recent European Droughts From Long-term Perspective

Ing. Vojtěch Moravec

Disertační práce

Abstract:

Recent European droughts are perceived as the most extreme, causing severe impacts on agriculture, a massive die-off of spruce cultures as well as trouble-causing events harming the industry. The fact that the drought is slowly evolving creepy phenomenon, makes it difficult to map its properties such as, for example, emergence, severity and termination. The length of instrumental records for a phenomenon that does not occur every year makes the assessment of drought properties also biased. Due to the development of climate and hydrological modelling, we are now able to simulate past droughts and assess their properties. Nevertheless, with the spatio-temporal resolution of such simulations and their rather narrow focus, it could be misleading to draw robust conclusions about the extremity of recent dry years. To this end, we bring a 250-year European drought inventory, which tries to describe droughts from a multivariate perspective and the severity of recent European droughts is put in the context of the past 250 years in this study. Here we show, that the severity of recent droughts is comparable to those experienced in the first half of the century. On the other hand, their temporal distribution increased over the last couple of decades, so their cumulative effect on agriculture, forestry and industry is more tangible, making up for multi-year droughts. We point out the multi-year drought 2014--2018, which according to our results exhibited the most extreme agriculture drought in the last 250 years. We also bring a piece of evidence that not all drought years follow the European drying pattern, i.e. Northern Europe gets wetter and the southern part of Europe dries up. The year 2018 showed the total opposite bringing awareness to agriculture adaptation planning.

Keywords

drought, natural hazards, climate extremes, Europe, ensemble hydrologic modelling

Jazyk práce: angličtina

Datum vytvoření / odevzdání či podání práce: 19. 1. 2023

Obhajoba závěrečné práce

• Vedoucí: prof. Ing. Martin Hanel, Ph.D.

Česká zemědělská univerzita v Praze

Fakulta životního prostředí

Doktorský studijní program / obor:
Krajinné inženýrství / Environmentální modelování