Publication details

The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case

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Authors

WETTER Oliver PFISTER Christian WERNER Johannes P. ZORITA Eduardo WAGNER Sebastian SENEVIRATNE Sonia I. HERGET Jürgen GRÜNEWALD Uwe LUTERBACHER Jürg ALCOFORADO Maria-Joao BARRIENDOS Mariano BIEBER Ursula BRÁZDIL Rudolf BURMEISTER Karl H. CAMENISCH Chantal CONTINO Antonio DOBROVOLNÝ Petr GLASER Rüdiger HIMMELSBACH Iso KISS Andrea KOTYZA Oldřich LABBÉ Thomas LIMANÓWKA Danuta LITZENBURGER Laurent NORDLI Oyvind PRIBYL Kathleen RETSÖ Dag RIEMANN Dirk ROHR Christian SIEGFRIED Werner SÖDERBERG Johan SPRING Jean-Laurent

Year of publication 2014
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Climatic Change
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1184-2
Field Atmosphere sciences, meteorology
Keywords documentary evidence; meteorological drought ; hydrological drought; agricultural drought; socio-economic drought; megadrought; precipitation; Europe
Description The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent reconstruction of spring–summer temperatures for WE resulted in the likelihood of significantly higher temperatures in 1540. In order to check the plausibility of this result we investigated the severity of the 1540 drought by putting forward the argument of the known soil desiccation-temperature feedback. Based on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources originating from an area of 2 to 3 million km2, we show that Europe was affected by an unprecedented 11-month-long Megadrought. The estimated number of precipitation days and precipitation amount for Central and Western Europe in 1540 is significantly lower than the 100-year minima of the instrumental measurement period for spring, summer and autumn. This result is supported by independent documentary evidence about extremely low river flows and Europe-wide wild-, forest- and settlement fires. We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.
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