Drought · Europe
Europe's summer of dry rivers
By August 2022 almost half of the European Union was under a drought warning. The winter had been dry in the south and the west, spring rain fell short, and from June heatwave followed heatwave. Rivers shrank to sandbanks: the Po in northern Italy, the Loire in France, the Rhine at Kaub, where barges could only carry a fraction of their load. A researcher at the EU's Joint Research Centre said it might prove the worst drought in 500 years.
Summer 2022 · Europe · ERA5
309mm
Po valley rain, January–July
ERA5, against a 1991–2020 normal of 476 mm for those seven months.
+2.1°C
Po valley, July 2022
ERA5's mean July temperature (27.6 °C) against the normal.
What happened
Drought builds slowly. Over the winter of 2021–22 the Alps had little snow, and the snowmelt that feeds the Po and the Rhine through summer was small. Spring rain was short across much of the west and south. Then the summer heat, with heatwaves in June, July and August, dried the soil further and raised the water lost from plants and reservoirs.
By August harvests of maize and sunflower were failing across France, Italy and Spain, rivers were too warm to cool power stations, and Italy declared a state of emergency in the Po basin. The European Commission's drought observatory put 47 % of the EU under warning and 17 % under alert.N1
The ground, a normal summer and this one
Soil moisture is where a drought shows first for farmers. The Lab's maps of June–August soil moisture for 2021, an ordinary summer, and 2022 show the difference from Portugal to Romania.
Missing rain, extra heat
65%
The share of its normal rain the Po valley received from January to July 2022 in ERA5. An August of thunderstorms brought rain, but on hard, dry ground much of it ran off.
| Month | Rain mm | Normal mm | Mean °C | Normal °C |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| June | 74 | 73 | 25.4 | 23.0 |
| July | 40 | 54 | 27.6 | 25.5 |
| August | 127 | 70 | 26.0 | 25.1 |
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References
News
- N1Euronews. Europe's drought could be the worst in 500 years, warns researcher. 10 August 2022.The share of the EU under drought warning and alert, and the comparison with the past 500 years.