High Temperatures Exacerbated by Climate Change Made 2022 Northern Hemisphere Droughts More Likely

This article was first published at the World Weather Attribution website. | Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. Water shortages, extensive fires, high food prices and severe crop losses were among the most important impacts of one of the hottest European summers on record, with heat waves and exceptionally low rainfall across the Northern Hemisphere. These conditions led to very dry soils particularly in France, Germany and other central European countries (called West-Central Europe in the following); mainland China also experienced exceptionally high temperatures and dryness. These deficits in soil moisture led to poor harvests in the affected regions, increased fire risk, and, in combination with already very high food prices, is expected to threaten food security across the world.

Scientists from Switzerland, India, the Netherlands, France, the United States of America and the United Kingdom, collaborated to assess to what extent human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the low soil moisture, both at the surface and the root zones for most crops.

Figure 1: a) Anomaly in the June to August average root zone soil moisture w.r.t 1950-2022 climate over the northern hemisphere so-called ‘extratropics’ (NHET) region (full domain shown) based on the ERA5-Land dataset. The smaller region West-Central Europe (WCE)  is highlighted by the red box. (b) same as (a) for surface soil moisture. 

Publication: Stefan M. M. Kuks, et al., Commentary for the RAIN Symposium: Dutch Water Infrastructure Challenged by Climate Change, Sage Journals (2023). DOI: 10.1177/1087724X22112881

Original Story Source: University of Copenhagen