Persistent multi-scale fluctuations shift European hydroclimate to its millennial boundaries.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 29720588.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-04207-7 and PMC identifier 5932079.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
In recent years, there has been growing concern about the effect of global warming on water resources, especially at regional and continental scales. The last IPCC report on extremes states that there is medium confidence about an increase on European drought frequency during twentieth century. Here we use the Old World Drought Atlas palaeoclimatic reconstruction to show that when Europe's hydroclimate is examined under a millennial, multi-scale perspective, a significant decrease in dryness can be observed since 1920 over most of central and northern Europe. On the contrary, in the south, drying conditions have prevailed, creating an intense north-to-south dipole. In both cases, hydroclimatic conditions have shifted to, and in some regions exceeded, their millennial boundaries, remaining at these extreme levels for the longest period of the 1000-year-long record.