2024-03-29T02:06:29Zhttp://digital.csic.es/dspace-oai/requestoai:digital.csic.es:10261/950492020-06-02T09:19:04Zcom_10261_75com_10261_6com_10261_65com_10261_8col_10261_328col_10261_318
Evidence of increasing drought severity caused by temperature rise in southern Europe
Vicente Serrano, Sergio M.
López-Moreno, Juan I.
Beguería, Santiago
Lorenzo-Lacruz, Jorge
Sánchez-Lorenzo, Arturo
García-Ruiz, José María
Azorín-Molina, César
Morán-Tejeda, Enrique
Revuelto, Jesús
Trigo, Ricardo M.
Coelho, Fatima
Espejo, Francisco
Evapotranspiration
Streamflow
Climate change
Water Resources
9 Pags., 6 Figs. The Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further
distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the
of the work, journal citation and DOI.
We use high quality climate data from ground meteorological stations in the Iberian Peninsula (IP) and robust drought indices to confirm that drought severity has increased in the past five decades, as a consequence of greater atmospheric evaporative demand resulting from temperature rise. Increased drought severity is independent of the model used to quantify the reference evapotranspiration. We have also focused on drought impacts to drought-sensitive systems, such as river discharge, by analyzing streamflow data for 287 rivers in the IP, and found that hydrological drought frequency and severity have also increased in the past five decades in natural, regulated and highly regulated basins. Recent positive trend in the atmospheric water demand has had a direct influence on the temporal evolution of streamflows, clearly identified during the warm season, in which higher evapotranspiration rates are recorded. This pattern of increase in evaporative demand and greater drought severity is probably applicable to other semiarid regions of the world, including other Mediterranean areas, the Sahel, southern Australia and South Africa, and can be expected to increasingly compromise water supplies and cause political, social and economic tensions among regions in the near future.
2014-04-07T08:50:46Z
2014-04-07T08:50:46Z
2014-04
artículo
Vicente-Serrano SM, López-Moreno JI, Beguería S, Lorenzo-Lacruz J, Sánchez-Lorenzo A, García-Ruiz JM, Azorín-Molina E, Morán-Tejeda E, Revuelto J, Trigo R, Coelho F, Espejo F. Evidence of increasing drought severity caused by temperature rise in southern Europe. Environmental Research Letters 9 (4): 44001 (2014)
1748-9326
http://hdl.handle.net/10261/95049
10.1088/1748-9326/9/4/044001
eng
Publisher's version
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
openAccess
Institute of Physics Publishing