The dry summer of 2018, was for many farmers a disaster. Such extreme weather there will be in future more and more. The German weather service wants to react, say with better previously.
What are currently many winter wish tired, there was in the past year, in Excess: Sunny, warm, and dry high-pressure weather. These so-called blocked weather patterns of the Atlantic were often low foothills velvet precipitation from Central Europe, and have led in Germany to the warmest, sunniest and one of the driest years since the beginning of weather records.
The consequences were clearly felt: the low-water, forest fires, withered meadows, and especially crop losses with great economic damage. 2018 was clearly in a sign of climate change.
The river bed of the Elbe river dried up in front of the old town of Dresden. Due to the dry summer 2018, the level of fraud in Dresden in August only 56 centimeters.
“We are more likely to expect drought”
And this exceptional drought is not a single event: “climate research agree that Such extreme weather with climate change increasingly likely. We must, in future, more frequent, if not regular intervals, with drought in Germany expect,” explains Paul Becker, Vice-President of the German weather service (DWD), at this year’s climate press conference.
This will change long-term forecasts of dry periods becoming more and more important and their use is a necessary adaptation to the climate.
Unfortunately, is not to be expected that there is still so time-consuming and high-performance computers current weather models, the droughts are going to say several weeks in advance to reliably predict. The weather is complex and chaotic.
soil moisture changes only slowly
The soil moisture is, however, a slowly changing memory size with large buffer effect. The soils are saturated with moisture, a drought far unbeschadeter survive, as if in advance a deficit existed.
This property has made the DWD forecasting of the soil moisture advantage and a long-term prediction, which is enough for up to six weeks in the future.
A retrospective analysis of the drought of 2018 has shown that “the DWD in June 2018 in large Parts of Germany, sustained drought at the end of six weeks in advance with good quality could have predicted,” says Becker.
The is to cautious optimism, the crop failures as a result of future droughts at least mitigated, if not completely prevented.
by the Way, the ground is wet in Parts of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt’s already back below 50 percent. This is a this time of year, concern low value. A longer-lasting precipitation, poor weather conditions would result in these regions so rapidly to drought stress, which would now be detected earlier than a year ago.
