A swath of central Europe has suffered the most severe drought since 2003 in what EU climate experts see as a harbinger of climate changes to come.
Rainless weeks and relentless heat desiccated a vast tract of central European land separating the continent’s drier south from its wetter north between April 1 and July 31, according to a report by the European drought observatory (EDO).
“This is where we expect to see more extreme weather such as floods and droughts in the future, and what we are gradually starting to see in the present,” said Frank Raes, the head of the climate change unit at the EU’s Joint Research Center which commissioned the report.
It found that monthly rainfall averages fell by as much as 80 percent in parts of France, and parts of northern Spain experienced daily temperatures over 30 degrees for more than 40 consecutive days.
Drought conditions did ease in August, but the European center for medium-range weather forecasting predicts above average temperatures across the continent in September, with drier than usual conditions for most of central and northern Europe.
While the UK and some parts of Europe have been relatively unaffected by the water shortages, the drought was even worse than 2003 in regions such Limousin in France, Rhine Hessen-Phalz in Germany and Oost Vlaanderen, Belgium.
However, Dim Coumou, a climate modeller at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research advised caution in drawing conclusions about individual weather events. “It is too early to say how severe the current drought in Europe is,” he said.
“The Mediterranean is generally considered a hotspot and the models project strong increases in drought conditions there. But where exactly the [central European] belt is, I don’t think can be quantified,” he said.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/european-extreme-weather-drought-19410
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