An event‑oriented database of meteorological droughts in Europe based on spatio‑temporal clustering

Droughts evolve in space and time without following borders or pre‑determined temporal constraints. Here, we present a new database of drought events built with a three‑dimensional density‑based clustering algorithm. The chosen approach is able to identify and characterize the spatio‑temporal evolution of drought events, and it was tuned with a supervised approach against a set of past global droughts characterized independently by multiple drought experts. About 200 events were detected over Europein the period 1981‑2020 using SPI‑3 (3‑month cumulated Standardized Precipitation Index) maps derived from the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium‑range Weather Forecasts) 5th generation reanalysis (ERA5) precipitation. The largest European meteorological droughts during this period occurred in 1996, 2003, 2002 and 2018. A general agreement between the major events identified by the algorithm and drought impact records was found, as well as with previous datasets based on pre‑defined regions.

CAMMALLERI Carmelo;  ACOSTA NAVARRO Juan;  BAVERA Davide;  DIAZ Vitali;  DI CIOLLO Chiara;  MAETENS Willem;  MAGNI Diego;  MASANTE Dario;  SPINONI Jonathan;  TORETI Andrea; 

2023-07-26

NATURE PORTFOLIO

JRC130372

2045-2322 (online),   

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30153-6,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC130372,   

10.1038/s41598-023-30153-6 (online),