Multi-Index Drought Assessment in Europe

Any attempt for the application of integrated drought management, requires identifying and characterizing the event per se. The questions of scale, boundary, and of geographic areal extend are of central concern for any efforts of drought assessment, impacts identification, and thus of drought mitigation implementation mechanisms. The use of drought indices, such as Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), has often lead to pragmatic realization of drought duration, magnitude and spatial extend. The current effort presents the implementation of SPI and SPEI on a Pan-European scale and it is evaluated using existing precipitation and temperature data. The E-OBS gridded dataset for precipitation, minimum temperature, and maximum temperature were used, covering the period 1969 – 2018. The two indices were estimated for time steps of 6, and 12 months. The results for the application period of recurrent droughts indicate the potential that both indices offer for an improvement on drought management, comparability, identification of critical areas, threshold definitions, towards better planning and mobilization of resources for mitigation efforts.