Evidence of increasing drought severity caused by temperature rise in southern Europe
By S. Vicente‐Serrano, J. López‐Moreno, S. Beguerı́a, J. Lorenzo‐Lacruz, A. Sanchez‐Lorenzo, J. García‐Ruiz, C. Azorín-Molina, E. Morán-Tejeda, J. Revuelto, Ricardo M. Trigo and 2 more. 2014
696 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We use high quality climate data from ground meteorological stations in the Iberian Peninsula (IP) and robust drought indices to confirm that drought severity has increased in the past five decades, as a consequence of greater atmospheric evaporative demand resulting from temperature rise. Increased drought severity is independent of the model used to quantify the reference evapotranspiration. We have also focused on drought impacts to drought-sensitive systems, such as river discharge, by analyzing streamflow data for 287 rivers in the IP, and found that hydrological drought frequency and severity have also increased in the past five decades in natural, regulated and highly regulated basins. Recent positive trend in the atmospheric water demand has had a direct influence on the temporal evolution of streamflows, clearly identified during the warm season, in which higher evapotranspiration rates are recorded. This pattern of increase in evaporative demand and greater drought severity is probably applicable to other semiarid regions of the world, including other Mediterranean areas, the Sahel, southern Australia and South Africa, and can be expected to increasingly compromise water supplies and cause political, social and economic tensions among regions in the near future.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18a1546df045d6f4998d5e2891019b94b38c1964
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Temporal-Spatial Variation of Drought Indicated by SPI and SPEI in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China (2015, background): “[86] confirmed that drought severity increased as a consequence of greater atmospheric evaporative demand resulting from temperature rise.”
- From leaf to whole-plant water use efficiency (WUE) in complex canopies: Limitations of leaf WUE as a selection target (2015, background): “All of these climate change phenomena are prevalent in most semiarid areas [8].”
- Impact of agricultural drought on main crop yields in the Republic of Moldova (2016, methodology): “2 billion euros per year during recent decades (European Environment Agency, 2010; Vicente-Serrano et al., 2014b; Andreu et al., 2015).”