MYDROUGHT · Multi-Year Droughts: Robust Understanding and Information Generated by Enhanced Process Determination

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Project objective

Droughts easily enter the realm of personal experience. Their socio-economic and ecologic impacts aggravate with longer event duration and cascade into multiple sectors. Recent events, as 2018-2020 in Europe, remind us of droughts in consecutive years with high stress to adaptation: multi-year droughts (MYD). While the general understanding of drought drivers is high, causes for MYD development are poorly understood. Do MYD miss drought-ending rainfall events or is the memory effect of soils the main culprit? How will climate change affect the interplay of MYD drivers? In MYDROUGHT, I will answer these questions with University of Graz. I will provide the best-informed understanding on the natural drivers of MYD, with a special focus on Europe. Since MYD are rare events, I will innovatively combine different lines of evidence to obtain reliable information: In a novel evaluation approach, paleo data (a) will contextualize the representation of MYD in climate models. In large ensemble data and during a secondment in Wageningen (b), I will identify drivers of ‘typical’ MYD using cutting-edge statistics and embracing the very recent paradigm of investigating drought ends. With the large sample of MYD, the results will be statistically robust. A small selection of these MYD will serve as starting point for (c) where I will employ a novel model experiment set-up: a storyline simulation in a hemispheric domain with weather conditions of ‘short droughts’ inserted before a MYD – will they still produce a MYD? To integrate my findings, I will develop a framework that considers attributes of robustness which will be discussed in a new international task team of which I am a member. In the mid-term, MYDROUGHT aims at fostering resilience towards MYDs to limit socio-economic and ecological losses. With MYDROUGHT and the expertise gathered, I will be perfectly equipped to apply for junior group leader positions for continuing this research.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITAET GRAZ · GrazCoordinatorAustria
• WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY · WageningenNetherlands

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101275756