Fig. 2: Drought events from a long-term perspective.
From: Past megadroughts in central Europe were longer, more severe and less warm than modern droughts
a Regional mean Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA)21 PDSI index for central Europe (3°E-20°E, 45°N-56°N, black line) for the 1000–2012 period and the instrumental50 June through August scPDSI (solid red line) for the 1901–2018 period. Uncertainty (1σ) calculated as the root-mean-squared error from the residual fit to the instrumental series shown as the shaded gray region. The blue line represents the 31 years running mean of the OWDA time series; (b) Comparison between the reconstructed PDSI index (black line)21 and the observed scPDSI index (red line)50 over the common period: 1901–2012; (c) The fitted Gaussian distribution of the reconstructed PDSI21 values for different time periods: 1400–1480 (red line), 1770–1840 (orange line), 1901–2012 (gray line) and for the observational data50 for the period 1901–2018 (blue line). The values for 2003, 2015, and 2018 are indicated with a red line. The OWDA record has been adjusted by the mean and standard deviation so that it has the same mean and standard deviation as the instrumental data.
