Droughts are among the most costly natural disasters because they impact heavily on the economy of a region as well as on its social and cultural activities. Droughts do not only occur in arid or semiarid regions but also in humid ones. The year 2007, for example, was the sunniest, hottest and driest in Germany in the last two centuries. In this case, it was too dry too early. As a result, the harvest was cut by half leading to enormous losses in the primary sector. Consumer prices of some agricultural products went up 26 percent. The purpose of this study is to identify the major drought events in Germany since 1950 based on their severity, duration and areal extend. To achieve this goal, a 60-yr retrospective hydrological simulation of the land surface water budget over Germany was carried out with the process based distributed hydrological model mHM (Samaniego et al. 2010) forced with grided daily precipitation and temperature data at 4x4 km^2 . Point measurement data from more than 5600 rain gauges and about 1120 meteorological stations (German Meteorological Service) were interpolated with external drift Kriging to produce highly consistent fields of meteorological variables. Land cover change was also considered during this period.

Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Reihe Karlsruher Meteorologisches Kolloquium

Referent/in
Dr. Luis Samaniego

UFZ, Leipzig
Department Hydrosystemmodellierung

Veranstalter
Institut für Meteorologie und Klimaforschung - Atmosphärische Umweltforschung (IMK-IFU)
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
Kreuzeckbahnstraße 19
82467 Garmisch-Partenkirchen
E-Mail: hape schmid ∂does-not-exist.imk kit edu

Zielgruppe
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeitende