Weather is the primary driver or trigger of droughts, via precipitation deficits and/or excessive evapotranspiration, that can lead to a drying at the land surface. In the UK, the most severe drought in the past few decades took place in 1975-1976. Other, more recent drought include 1990-1992, 1995-1997, 2003 and 2010-2012. Figure 1 shows time series of relevant variable for these drought events for various regions in the Great Britain.
The limited number of droughts in the observational record hampers accurate quantification of the probabilities associated with various types of droughts. In MaRIUS, a reconstruction of past weather back to 1850 and a large number of drought events are generated with a climate model for present and future conditions to provide a wide range of plausible drought events based on which to assess possible drought management and planning options. These meteorological drought events are then fed into various hydrological and impact models to allow for a more accurate quantification of drought risk. In addition, these datasets are used to investigate the large-scale drivers of drought, such as sea surface temperatures.
You can find information about the contribution of the MaRIUS climate team to the project: the reconstruction of past weather and the synthetic event set, future climate projections and droughts, the large-scale drivers of UK drought and the drought datasets generated within the MaRIUS projects.
