Abstract
Persistent droughts are known to induce stress on agricultural crops and forest ecosystems. Severe long-lasting droughts lead to food insecurity. With rising air temperatures and declining precipitation totals, there is often a presumption that droughts are becoming more severe. To understand the complexity of interrelated physical processes on various temporal scales, it is important to analyse trends and mutual relationships between drought-related climatic variables. In this paper, we analyse monthly time series of near-surface air temperature, precipitation totals, potential evapotranspiration, climatic water balance, and two meteorological drought indices: the standardised precipitation index (SPI) and the standardised precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI), at a total of 71 locations located within the western Carpathian Mountains (Slovakia) and the adjacent northern part of the Pannonian Plain. The analysed data cover the time period 1981–2019. Quantile regression was used to determine the slopes of temporal trends in the investigated climate variables. The mutual relationships between precipitation and air temperature were analysed on a seasonal basis. Negative coupling (~ − 5.1%/°C) between precipitation and air temperature was observed in the spring season. Positive coupling between precipitation and air temperature was observed in the remaining part of the year. Spatio-temporal analyses of SPEI revealed intensification of meteorological drought in the spring season that continues into summer at most of the analysed locations. The negative temporal trends in the SPEI suggest that the severity of meteorological drought has increased over the investigated period.
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Data availability
The precipitation and air temperature data were provided by the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute. The raw unprocessed data may not be shared not re-used without written consent of the Slovak Hydrometeorological institute. The processed data presented in the paper are available upon reasonable request.
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Funding
The research presented in this paper would not be possible without the following grants: scientific support of climate change adaptation in agriculture and mitigation of soil degradation (ITMS2014 + 313011W580), supported by the Integrated Infrastructure Operational Programme and funded by the ERDF, and the national VEGA grant no. 2/0003/21 “complex analysis of the effects of rising air temperature on rainfall extremes in Slovakia.”
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MO conducted statistical analyses; JP provided and pre-processed data; MO wrote the manuscript; MO and JP reviewed the manuscript prior to submission and the subsequent revisions.
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Onderka, M., Pecho, J. On how precipitation-temperature coupling affects drought severity in the western Carpathians and the adjacent northern part of the Pannonian Plain. Theor Appl Climatol 152, 681–692 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-023-04395-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-023-04395-3