eXtreme EuRopean drOughtS: multimodel synthesis of past, present and future events

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There are plenty of studies assessing the severity of recent European droughts. However, most of these studies evaluate the droughts within the context of hydroclimatic conditions of the second half of the 20th century. It is thus possible, that recent European drought events are less (or more) severe than previously thought. The XEROS project aims at (1) assessing the extremity of recent European drought events in the perspective of long (i.e. 500-year) benchmark period and (2) improving the process understanding of drought genesis. The underlying analysis will employ a multi-model reconstruction of hydrologic variables using the palaeoclimatic reconstructed driving data. Current state-of-the-art hydrologic/land surface models will be used to estimate spatio-temporal dynamics of the surface and subsurface water component. This will enable an improved understanding of historical characterisation of large scale drought events and exploratory analysis of the governing atmospheric parameters influencing the genesis of droughts. Better understanding of the uncertainties in the past will allow to project future hydroclimatic conditions across Europe more reliably. This will be achieved by constraining the (future) climate model simulations by the available (past) observation-based reconstructed hydroclimatic variables. The XEROS project builds upon a modelling infrastructure which has been recently established across Europe by our team. Additionally, this project aims to bring together two research groups of complementary scientific knowledge: the German-based applicants (UFZ) have strong expertise on understanding and modelling the complex interaction of land-surface hydrologic processes, and the Czech-based applicants (CULS) having strong scientific background in statistical analysis of hydrologic and climate variability.