water
Article
The Effect of Water Vapor Originating from Land on the 2018
Drought Development in Europe
Fares Al Hasan 1,*, Andreas Link 2and Ruud J. van der Ent 1
Citation: Al Hasan, F.; Link, A.; van
der Ent, R.J. The Effect of Water Vapor
Originating from Land on the 2018
Drought Development in Europe.
Water 2021,13, 2856. https://
doi.org/10.3390/w13202856
Academic Editor: Renato Morbidelli
Received: 19 July 2021
Accepted: 8 October 2021
Published: 13 October 2021
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1Department of Water Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University
2Sustainable Engineering, Technische Universität Berlin, 10623 Berlin, Germany; andr[email protected]
*Correspondence: [email protected]
Abstract:
The 2018 summer drought in Europe was particularly extreme in terms of intensity and
impact due to the combination of low rainfall and high temperatures. However, it remains unclear
how this drought developed in time and space in such an extreme way. In this study we aimed to get
a better understanding of the role of land–atmosphere interactions. More specifically, we investigated
whether there was a change in water vapor originating from land, if that caused a reduction in
rainfall, and by this mechanism possibly the propagation and intensification of the drought in Europe.
Our first step was to use remote sensing products for soil moisture content (SMC) and the normalized
difference vegetation index (NDVI) to see where the 2018 drought started and how it developed in
time and space. Our SMC and NDVI analysis showed that the 2018 drought started to impact the
soil and vegetation state in June in Scandinavia and the British Isles. After that it moved towards
the west of Europe where it intensified in July and August. In September, it started to decay. In
October, drought was observed in Southeast Europe as well. Based on the observed patterns we
divided Europe into six regions of similar spatiotemporal characteristics of SMC and NDVI. Then, we
used a global gridded dataset of the fate of land evaporation (i.e., where it ends up as precipitation)
to investigate whether the drought intensification and propagation was impacted by the reduction
in water vapor transported from the regions that first experienced the drought. This impact was
investigated by identifying the anomalies in the water vapor originating from land recycling, imports,
and exports within Europe during the spring, summer, and autumn seasons. From these regions we
identified four drought regions and investigated the changes in water vapor originating from source
regions on the development of drought in those regions. It was found that during the onset phase of
the 2018 drought in Europe that the water vapor originating from land played an important role in
mitigating the precipitation anomalies as, for example, the share of land evaporation contributing
to precipitation increased from 27% (normal years) to 38% (2018) during July in the west of Europe.
Land evaporation played a minor role in amplifying it during the intensification phase of the drought
as the share of land evaporation contribution to precipitation decreased from 23% (normal years) to
21% (2018) during August in the west of Europe. These findings are somewhat in contrast to similar
studies in other continents that found the land surface to play a strong amplifying role for drought
development. Subsequently, we found that the relative increase in the amount of land water vapor
originating from eastern half of Europe played a role in delaying the onset and accelerating the decay
of the 2018 drought in the west of Europe.
Keywords: drought; NDVI; soil moisture; moisture recycling; land–atmosphere interactions
1. Introduction
Increase in the frequency and intensity of drought events and their catastrophic effects
on many life aspects is a matter of growing concern [
1
]. An example of a recent severe and
impactful drought is that of 2018 in Europe [
2
,
3
]. During spring, summer and autumn of
2018 in Europe, the temperatures were much higher than average and the rainfall rates were
Water 2021,13, 2856. https://doi.org/10.3390/w13202856 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/water
Water 2021,13, 2856 2 of 14
much lower than normal which created favorable conditions for the emergence of extreme
drought [
4
]. Bakke et al. [
5
] related the development of extreme meteorological drought
in Northern and part of Central Europe during the summer of 2018 to the high-pressure
system over the North Sea and the low-pressure system over Greenland and Russia. The
frequency of such an extreme drought event will become higher because of climate change
and it is expected the drought of 2018 could become common occurrence around 2043 [4].
A poorly understood aspect of extreme drought events, such as the 2018 drought in Europe,
is the role of land–atmosphere interactions, and more specifically the role of anomalies in
water vapor originating from land [6].
Droughts can be monitored in time and space making use of remote sensing obser-
vations. When focusing on agricultural and vegetation drought, soil moisture and NDVI
are among the most important satellite observations that can be used to detect and to
monitor large-scale drought events [
7
–
13
]. Whereas the remote sensing observations reveal
spatiotemporal patterns of drought development, they do not give direct information
about the processes. Studies have indicated that the large scale droughts events tend to
get displaced from their origins to other areas, and in some cases these displacements
amounted to several thousand kilometers [
14
,
15
]. For example, Herrera-Estrada et al. [
14
],
using a Lagrangian approach, found that about 10% of the drought events that took place
between 1979 and 2009 in North America had been displaced more than 500 km from
their origins.
The process responsible for drought displacement is thought to be the lack of atmo-
spheric moisture transport caused by a reduction of evaporation from upwind regions,
and similarly the same process could cause drought intensification when moisture sources
are mainly local [
16
–
18
]. Herrera-Estrada et al. [
16
] found that the lack of upwind water
vapor originating from land was responsible for about 62% of the rainfall shortage in down-
wind regions during the 2012 Midwest drought event in the USA. Similarly, Schumacher
et al. [
17
] found that the lack of soil moisture in upwind regions was behind increasing
the sensible heat advection to downwind regions by 30% during the 2003 and 2010 mega
heatwave events in Europe. Holgate et al. [
18
] found that the water vapor originating from
land played a role in exacerbating the precipitation anomalies, although this role is minor
with up to 6% during three drought events that occurred in southeast Australia between
1981 and 2011.
Benedict et al. [
19
] studied the moisture sources of the Rhine basin in Europe during
the dry summers of 2003 and 2018 and did not find an important role for the land. They
found that the reduction in the amount of transported water vapor originating from
the ocean was behind the development of the extreme droughts. They also concluded
that the change in the regional and imported water vapor from source regions to Rhine
basin resulted mainly from change in wind directions and not because of the change
in the amount of water vapor originating from source regions. However, the complete
development in time and space of the extreme drought over the European continent in
2018 and the role of anomalies in water vapor originating from the land is still unclear.
The aim of this paper is to better understand the role of water vapor transport anoma-
lies originating from land evaporation on the onset, intensification, propagation, and
displacement of the 2018 drought event in Europe. Moreover, if reduced water vapor
transport originating from land is found to play a role in causing reduced precipitation
we want to know if (1) this is caused by reduced regional and upwind land evaporation
with the general source region for precipitation being rather stable, or (2) this is caused by
changes in moisture transport direction leading to different precipitation source regions.
First we will, however, make a spatiotemporal analysis of the 2018 drought development
using two of the most popular drought indicators derived from satellite imagery, which are
soil moisture content (SMC) [
20
] and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) [
8
].
We will use these indicators to group regions in Europe that experienced similar drought
development (see Section 3.1). After that, we will analyze the evaporation export and pre-
cipitation import—or regional recycling—of atmospheric moisture for these regions under
Water 2021,13, 2856 3 of 14
normal conditions and for the anomalous 2018 case making use of gridded source–sink
relationships of atmospheric water vapor [
21
] (see Section 3.2). The findings of this study
will provide more clarity on the significance of water vapor transport from upwind and lo-
cal land regions to downwind regions on the dampening or amplification and propagation
of a drought event.
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Study Area and Time Span
We studied the domain that lies between 11
◦
W–32
◦
E and 34–73
◦
N (see Figure 1).
Although this does not correspond exactly with Europe from a geographical sense, we will
still refer to this domain as Europe for simplicity. We focus our analysis on the months
May to October, because these were the driest months [
22
] and use the years 2000–2018 as
a baseline based on data availability.
2.2. Remote Sensing Based Drought Indicators
For observing the drought, we aimed to avoid indicators based on modelling, but
chose more direct observations derived from remote sensing which are soil moisture content
(SMC) and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). SMC was obtained from
the ESA CCI SM v04.7 product, which was generated from active and passive microwave
space borne instruments [
23
–
25
]. This product is regarded as the best in estimating SMC
and capturing the changes that connected with drought [
7
]. This product is regarded to
provide information about the amount of water present in approximately the top 5 cm of
the soil. The data of this product was downloaded for the period from 2002–2018.
In general, one would expect the vegetation to have a delayed response compared
to SMC in drought development. As such, vegetation indices derived from satellite
observation are useful to monitor the extent and severity of drought events [
10
]. The
monthly NDVI was obtained from the Monthly L3 global 0.05
◦
Modis Terre Vegetation
indices product [
26
]. The data of this product was downloaded for the period 2000–2018.
SMC and NDVI time series were used to generate ranking percentile maps of the 2018
situation over Europe by using the following expression:
Ci,2018 =Ri,2018
N+1×100, (1)
where, C
i,2018
is the calculated ranking percentile for the year 2018 in the month i.R
i,2018
is
the rank of the data point in the time series of that month i.Nis the number of years (17
years for SMC and 19 years for NDVI). Based on analyzing the SMC and NDVI ranking
percentile maps Europe was divided into different regions through a visual inspection
of similarity in terms of timing and spatial extent of the drought. For these regions we
computed the ranking percentiles of average SMC and average NDVI per region. We
divided the percentile bar into 3 equal parts and categorized it into ‘Dry’, ‘Normal’ and
‘Wet’. We classified a month as dry month when the SMC ranking percentiles of average of
that month and the NDVI ranking percentiles of the average of the following month are
both less than 33.4.
Water 2021,13, 2856 4 of 14
Figure 1.
The development of the 2018 drought in Europe from remote sensing data. (
a
) SMC ranking percentiles and (
b
)
NDVI ranking percentiles (Equation (1)). The numbers in the upper left corners of (
a
,
b
) indicate regions that were grouped
for similar drought development characteristics. Region 1 (Scandinavia and Baltic), region 2 (British Isles), region 3 (west of
Europe), region 4 (east of Europe), region 5 (southwest Europe) and region 6 (Southeast Europe), consecutively.
2.3. Total Evaporation and Precipitation Anomalies
We obtained evaporation and precipitation data for the period 2000 to 2018 from the
ERA-Interim reanalysis data [
27
] for consistency with the atmospheric water vapor source–
sink dataset (see Section 2.4). Precipitation Pand evaporation Eanomalies were calculated
for each region to be able to compare between land evaporation export and precipitation
originating from land import anomalies with the total evaporation and precipitation
anomalies. We used the following expression to calculate the anomalies:
∆zi,2018 =zi,2018 −zi, (2)
Water 2021,13, 2856 5 of 14
where, zrepresents Por E, respectively,
zi,2018
is the value in month i(mm month
−1
) and
zi
is the climatology of that month based on the 19 years of data (2000–2018).
2.4. Anomalies in Import and Export of Water Vapor Originating from Land
We used the fate of land evaporation dataset by Link et al. [
21
]. This dataset has 1.5
◦
resolution and was generated by running the Water Accounting Model 2-layers (WAM-
2layers) with ERA-Interim reanalysis data [
27
]. WAM-2layers is an Eulerian atmospheric
water vapor tracking model that tracks the flow of water from source (evaporation) to
sink (precipitation), based on 3-dimensional wind speeds and specific humidity [
28
]. The
fate of land evaporation dataset covered the period 2000–2018. WAM-2layers is a state-of-
the-art moisture tracking model that was validated against a regional climate model with
moisture tracking capabilities [
29
] and has been used broadly with different underlying
climate datasets answering a wide array of research questions [
30
–
35
]. The specific dataset
we used here [
21
] provides readily available moisture source–receptor relations globally
without the need of running moisture tracking again and has found first applications
besides this work [
36
]. These source–receptor relations were found to be similar compared
to another recent dataset [
37
]. We spatially resampled the data to high resolution around
the coast by considering the exact shape of coastline and as such dividing oceanic and
land contributions.
This dataset was used to detect the anomalies in atmospheric water vapor import and
export or regional recycling from land from May to October 2018 by calculating evaporation
export and precipitation import ratios. The ratio of water vapor that originated from
source region xand fell in sink region yin month iand year(s) jis called the evaporation
export ratio:
εi,j(x→y)=Ei,j(x→y)
Ei,j(x)
, (3)
where
Ei,j(x→y)
is the evaporation that was exported from region xto region yand
Ei,j(x)
is
the total evaporation from region xboth during month iand year(s) j. Similarly, we can
define the precipitation import ratio:
ρi,j(x→y)=Pi,j(x→y)
Pi,j(y)
, (4)
where it should be noted that Pis now defined in the sink region y. When xis equal to y,
the ratios in Equations (3) and (4) can be referred to as the regional evaporation recycling
ratio and the regional precipitation recycling ratio, respectively, instead [38].
The relative difference was computed to assess the role of anomalies in land evapora-
tion supplies during the 2018 drought with the following expression:
∆Pi,rel(x→y)=Pi,2018(x→y)−Pi,M(x→y)
Pi,M(x→y)
, (5)
where subscript Mstands for the climatology period of 2000–2018, and note that Pis always
expressed as a flux with dimension of [length or volume
×
time
−1
]. Note that in Equations
(3)–(5) the evaporation exports
Ei,j(x→y)
are the same as the precipitation imports
Pi,j(x→y)
in case they are expressed as a [volume ×time−1].
3. Results and Discussion
3.1. Spatiotemporal Drought Development from Remote Sensing Observations
We used the calculated SMC percentile map and calculated NDVI percentile map
(Figure 1) to detect and monitor the development of the 2018 drought in Europe. The SMC
and NDVI ranking percentile maps showed that the drought started in June with low SMC
(Figure 1a) in the north of Europe (Scandinavia and Baltic) and on the British Isles. After
that the drought started to affect the vegetation status (Figure 1b) and to expand towards
Water 2021,13, 2856 6 of 14
the west and the center of Europe in July and August. In September, drought appeared
in Southeast Europe. Whereas SMC appears to slightly recover in the west of Europe in
October, NDVI remains anomalously low.
Based on a visual analysis of Figure 1, we looked at similar spatiotemporal zones in
terms of NDVI and SMC signature and as such divided Europe into six regions. Regions
1 (Scandinavia and Baltic) and 2 (British Isles) experienced drought in June and July, and
started to recover in August. In region 3 (west of Europe) the drought was the most severe
and lasted from July until October. Region 4 (east of Europe) and 5 (Southwest Europe)
did not experience a significant drought. Region 6 (Southeast Europe) only experienced
drought in September and October. Further analysis focuses on the drought regions only
(region 1, 2, 3, and 6).
The first question in this study sought to determine the development of the 2018
drought in Europe in terms of intensity and spatial extension. As can be seen from the
maps in Figure 1, the spatial extent of the 2018 drought was large (about two-thirds of
Europe). It also can be seen from Figures 1and 2that the intensity of the 2018 drought had
varied between regions (the most intense drought period was registered in region 3). Our
maps also show possible relations between the drought in regions 1, 2, 3 and 6 in terms of
spatial and temporal connection. However, we further studied the role of water vapor to
confirm or reject possible links between those different drought regions.
Figure 2.
Region average development of (
a
) SMC and (
b
) NDVI in 2018. The spatial extent of the regions is shown in
Figure 1.
3.2. The Role of Atmospheric Moisture Originating from Land in Drought Development
3.2.1. Evaporation and Precipitation Anomalies
Figure 3provides an overview of the evaporation and precipitation anomalies during
May–October of 2018 for each region. These values are necessary to be able to interpret
further results about water vapor recycling and transport anomalies (Sections 3.2.2 and
3.2.3). In addition, these values confirm what we saw from the SMC and NDVI analysis
(Figures 1and 2), namely that region 1 and 2 experienced extreme drought in terms of
precipitation anomalies from May until July. Moreover, region 3 had anomalously low
precipitation from July until October, but interestingly, evaporation was initially higher
than average until the soil and vegetation were affected, and the evaporation anomalies
also turned negative: in June for region 1, in July and August for region 2, and from July
until October for region 3. Finally, region 6 experienced negative precipitation anomalies in
September and October and the evaporation anomalies turned negative in October. Overall,
region 3 experienced the biggest monthly reduction in precipitation (about 40 mm month
−1
in July) and evaporation (about 17 mm month−1in August).
Water 2021,13, 2856 7 of 14
Figure 3.
Region average development of (
a
) evaporation and (
b
) precipitation anomalies in 2018. The total numbers of
normal and 2018 evaporation and precipitation can be found in the Supplementary Materials (Tables S1–S4). The spatial
extent of the regions is shown in Figure 1.
3.2.2. Evaporation Export and Precipitation Import between Land and Drought Regions,
Recycling within Regions and Transport between Regions
The aim of calculating the evaporation export and precipitation import ratios was to
assess the role of transported land evaporation that emerged from different land source
regions in drought development of each drought region (Figures 4–6). When both the
2018 evaporation export ratio (dark red line) is below the normal evaporation export ratio
(orange line) and the 2018 precipitation import ratio (dark blue line) is below the normal
precipitation import ratio (cyan line) this should be interpreted as an amplifying effect on
the drought. Conversely, if the 2018 precipitation import is above the normal precipitation
import ratio this should be interpreted as a dampening effect on the drought (Figures 4–6).
However, the interplay is complicated as total precipitation and evaporation also deviate
(Figure 3). In Figures 3–6it can be observed that:
•
In region 1 (Scandinavia and Baltic) and during its drought period (yellow background)
the exported evaporation from land (sum of contributions from region 1 to 6) to this
region reported the highest percent point reductions in June (from 49% to 25%) and
July (from 53% to 23%) (Figure 4), related mostly to reductions in evaporation recycling
(Figure 5), but also from region 2–5 (Figure 6). This reduction in evaporation export
ratio led to reduce the precipitation import ratio from land to this region (from 30% to
22% in June and from 32% to 24% in July). Overall, we can conclude that the drought
in region 1 was somewhat amplified by the reduction in the evaporation export ratios
from land to this region during June (mainly regional (Figure 5)) and in July (mainly
from region 3 (Figure 6)) of 2018.
•
In region 2 (British Isles) and during its drought period (yellow background), the
precipitation import ratio from land experienced an increase in June (from 12% to 22%)
while it experienced a small decrease in July (from 9% to 7%) (Figure 4), which was also
the case for regional precipitation recycling (from 5% to 7% in June and from 4.5 to 4%
in July) (Figure 5). Conversely, there was a minor decrease in the evaporation export
ratio from land in June (from 7% to 6%) and July (from 6% to 3%). We can conclude
that in June the land surface through the increase in precipitation import/recycling
ratios, despite the small decrease in the evaporation export/recycling ratios, helped
in dampening the total precipitation anomalies. In July, the small decrease in the
precipitation import and evaporation export ratios (Figures 4–6) led to amplify the
drought conditions in this region. However, this amplification role is still minor in
comparison with the total evaporation and precipitation anomalies (Figure 3).
•In region 3 (west of Europe) and during its drought period (yellow background), the
precipitation import ratio from land increased in July (from 27% to 38%) (Figure 4)
as did the regional precipitation recycling ratio (from 12% to 18%) (Figure 5) while
Water 2021,13, 2856 8 of 14
the evaporation recycling ratio slightly decreased (from 8% to 7%) during this month
(Figure 5). In August all land import/export (Figure 4) as well as regional recycling
(Figure 5) ratios decreased slightly whereas total evaporation and precipitation were
also at a minimum (Figure 3). During September and October, the precipitation import
ratio experienced a small increase (about 2 percent points). We conclude that the
drought in this region was first dampened by land–atmosphere interactions during
July and then slightly amplified during August by the lack of imported (mainly region
2, (Figure 6)) and recycled water vapor (Figure 5) and then slightly dampened again
during September and October (mainly regions 4–6, (Figure 6)).
•
In region 6 (Southeast Europe) and during its drought period (yellow background), the
precipitation import ratio increased in September (from 25% to 31%), which can mainly
be attributed to an increase in regional recycling (Figure 5) and thus dampening of
the drought. In October there was little change in any of the ratios (Figures 4–6). We
can conclude that this drought event was rather disconnected from the other drought
regions as the anomalies in water vapor contribution from the other regions were very
small (Figure 6).
Figure 4.
The 2018 monthly evaporation export and precipitation import ratios (Equations (3) and (4)) with land being
the source region while drought regions 1, 2, 3 and 6 are being the sink regions. The location of these regions is indicated
in Figure 1. A yellow shading is applied when the month experiences drought (i.e., SMC of that month and NDVI of the
following month percentiles <33.4). Note, regions 4 and 5 did not experience a strong drought (Figures 1–3) and were,
therefore, not included here.
Figure 5.
The 2018 monthly regional evaporation and precipitation recycling ratios (Equations (3) and (4)) of the drought
regions 1, 2, 3 and 6. The location of these region is indicated in Figure 1. A yellow shading is applied when the month
experiences drought (i.e., SMC of that month and NDVI of the following month percentiles <33.4). Note, regions 4 and 5
did not experience a strong drought (Figures 1–3) and were, therefore, not included here.
Water 2021,13, 2856 9 of 14
Figure 6.
The 2018 monthly evaporation export and precipitation import ratios of (
a
) regions 1 (
b
) region 2, (
c
) region 3 and
(
d
) region 6 in comparison with the climatology (2000–2018) of monthly evaporation export and precipitation import ratios.
A yellow shading is applied when the month experiences drought (i.e., SMC of that month and NDVI of the following
month percentiles <33.4). The location of the regions is given in Figure 1.
3.2.3. Case Study West of Europe
Since region 3 experienced the most extreme drought of all regions (Figures 1–3) and
seemed to be influenced by land evaporation most (Figures 4–6) it was analyzed in more
detail. In general, we saw that the intensity of the 2018 drought was dampened in July and
amplified slightly in August by regional and transported land evaporation (Figures 4–6).
However, it is still not clear what happened exactly to the sources of moisture that supply
it to this region during the 2018 drought.
Figures 7and 8present the changes that happened to the land evaporation originating
from source regions and fell in sink region 3. Usually in May, region 2, region 3 itself and
region 5 are the main sources of moisture; however, during May of 2018 the amount of
moisture originating from source regions 2, 3 and 5 reported significant reduction (about
50% in average) while it reported significant increase from regions 1 and 4 (about 100% on
Water 2021,13, 2856 10 of 14
average). In June and July, the amount of water vapor from all source regions experienced
significant reduction (about 50% in average). This reduction continued in August only for
regions 1, 4, and 6 while the amount of moisture originating from source regions 2, 3, and 5
came back to the normal supply rate. In September, the amount of moisture originating
from region 1, 4 and 6 increased again (about 100% on average) while the rest of source
regions did not report any changes. In October, the supply of moisture from all source
regions was slightly below normal.
Figure 7.
(
a
) Monthly land evaporation emerging from source regions and falling in sink region 3 in 2018 (west of Europe).
(b) The climatology monthly land evaporation emerging from source regions and falling in sink region 3 (cyan outlined).
Water 2021,13, 2856 11 of 14
Figure 8.
The 2018 monthly difference in land evaporation originating from source regions and falling in sink region 3 (cyan
outlined) (Equation (5)), expressed as percentage).
These results show that the significant increase in the amount of water vapor from
region 1 and 4 in May could be behind the late onset of the 2018 drought in region 3 until
July where these regions compensated the lack of regional and transported water vapor
that originated from the usual sources. On the other hand, the increase in the amount of
water vapor originating from source regions 1, 4, and 6 in September provided some relief
to the drought situation, whereas these regions added additional water vapor compared to
the normal supply rate (Figures 7and 8).
The results of this study show that the significant reduction in the amount of water
vapor originating from land in July was not necessarily related to reduced total evaporation
(Figure 3), but mainly due to a change in moisture sources from the west to the northeast
(Figures 7and 8). Conversely, in August the usual strong moisture sources from the region
itself and from the British Isles were present (Figures 7and 8), but evaporation was not as
strong as normal (Figure 3), thus slightly amplifying the 2018 drought.
4. Conclusions
The aim of this paper was to better understand the role of water vapor transport
anomalies originating from land evaporation on the development of the 2018 drought
event in Europe. First, we made a spatiotemporal analysis of the 2018 drought development
Water 2021,13, 2856 12 of 14
using soil moisture content (SMC) and NDVI as drought indicators (Figures 1and 2). We
found that the 2018 drought started in June with low SMC (Figure 1a) in the north of
Europe (Scandinavia and Baltic region) and on the British Isles. After that the drought
started to affect the vegetation status (Figure 1b) and to expand towards the west and
the center of Europe in July and August. In September, drought appeared in Southeast
Europe. Whereas SMC appeared to slightly recover in the west of Europe in October, NDVI
remained anomalously low. Based on these results we divided Europe into six regions with
similar drought characteristics.
Next, we used a dataset of gridded source–sink relationships of atmospheric water
vapor [
21
] to answer our main research question, whether reduced water vapor transport
originating from land played a role in exacerbating the drought by causing reduced precip-
itation. We found that the water vapor originating from land had played an important role
as land evaporative sources made up 22, 22, 39 and 30% of the total precipitation in region 1,
region 2, region 3, and region 6 (see Figure 1for a map), respectively, during the onset of the
2018 drought. The monthly anomalies (2018—climatology, Figure 4) were up to +10 (region
1, May), +10 (region 2, June), +11 (region 3, July), and +5 (region 4, September) indicating
drought mitigation from land evaporation rather than amplification. For the Scandinavia
and Baltic regions, we found, however, that the 2018 drought was intensified by the lack
of regional water vapor in June and by the lack of transported water vapor from west of
Europe in July. For the British Isles, on the other hand, we found that the 2018 drought was
mitigated by the stable supply of regional and transported water vapor in June and slightly
amplified by the lack of regional water vapor in July. For the west of Europe we found
that the small reduction in the regional and transported land evaporation from source
regions to sink regions in July was not amplified by the drought in source regions during
onset and drought intensification. In contrast, regional and land contributions dampened
the precipitation anomalies and thus the drought development. For Southeast Europe the
increase in the regional water vapor mitigated the drought intensity in this region during
September. From the SMC and NDVI analysis it appeared possible that this drought in
Southeast Europe was connected to the drought in the rest of Europe, but the water vapor
transport analysis revealed that it was rather disconnected.
A case study for the west of Europe further revealed that in May there was a significant
reduction in the supply of moisture from the British Isles, the west of Europe, and Southwest
Europe, while there was significant increase in the supply from the Baltic and east of Europe.
In June and July there was significant reduction in moisture supply from all source regions.
In August the supply rate came back to normal for the British Isles, west of Europe, and
Southwest Europe, while it experienced a significant decrease from Scandinavia and Baltic,
East of Europe, and Southeast Europe. In September the supply of moisture did not
experience any change from all source regions located in the western half of Europe while it
increased significantly from all source regions, or part of the regions located in the eastern
half of Europe. In October the supply of moisture experienced a small reduction from all
source regions.
The empirical findings in this study provide a new understanding of the role of water
vapor originating from land on hindering the development of the drought during the
onset phase and the minor role on amplifying it during the intensification phase. For
the European climate it appeared that the often-hypothesized drought intensification and
propagation due to land–atmosphere feedbacks exist, but that it cannot be generalized
for any drought and is more likely to be of relevance during severe drought that lasts for
months. We find that this is related to the pathway of drought in the hydrological cycle
from a reduction in precipitation to a lagged reduction in shallow soil moisture, deep soil
moisture, and a subsequent response in transpiration.
Supplementary Materials:
The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/article/10
.3390/w13202856/s1, Table S1: 2018 monthly evaporation (mm/month), Table S2: Normal monthly
evaporation (mm/month), Table S3: 2018 monthly precipitation (mm/month), Table S4: Normal
monthly precipitation (mm/month).
Water 2021,13, 2856 13 of 14
Author Contributions:
Conceptualization, F.A.H. and R.J.v.d.E.; methodology, F.A.H. and R.J.v.d.E.;
software, F.A.H., A.L. and R.J.v.d.E.; formal analysis, F.A.H. and R.J.v.d.E.; writing—original draft
preparation, F.A.H. and R.J.v.d.E.; writing—review and editing, R.J.v.d.E. and A.L.; visualization,
F.A.H.; supervision, R.J.v.d.E.; project administration, R.J.v.d.E.; funding acquisition, F.A.H. and
R.J.v.d.E. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding:
This research was primarily funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
(NWO), project number VidW.1154.18.038. R.J.v.d.E. also acknowledges funding from NWO project
number 016.Veni.181.015.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement:
Soil moisture data was downloaded from ESA Climate Office [
23
,
25
].
NDVI data was downloaded from NASA EOSDIS Land Processes DAAC [
26
]. The fate of land
evaporation dataset was downloaded from Pangea [
39
]. The datasets and scripts generated during
the current study are available upon request from the corresponding author.
Acknowledgments:
We thank Wouter Dorigo and Tracy Scanlon (TU Wien) for giving us the access
to download the ESA CCI SM data (v04.5). We thank Susan Steele-Dunne for general advice during
various stages of this project. We thank all reviewers for their comments that helped us to improve
the manuscript.
Conflicts of Interest:
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design
of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or
in the decision to publish the results.
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