By analyzing oaks in Central Europe, a research team has been able to show a clear trend: Central Europe is becoming increasingly drier. The dry summers of recent years, from 2015 onwards, can also be the driest in 2000 years, although it cannot be determined with certainty.
It is getting drier in Central Europe and the droughts of recent summers seem to be the driest in two thousand years, according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience. These conclusions have been reached by the researchers behind the article by analyzing the annual rings of 147 living or dead oaks in the Czech Republic and Germany.
– Researchers have seen that the long-term trend since Roman times is towards increasingly drier summers but also periods of around 50-100 years with intervals of about five hundred years that are unusually dry. The driest period is now in the 2000s but not really statistically significantly drier than a period around 1500 which was also very dry, says Fredrik Charpentier Ljungkvist, historian and climate researcher at Stockholm University.
From 2015 onwards have thus been the driest years in 2000 years, but the difference to previous dry periods is not so great that it can be determined with certainty. What is clear from this study, however, is that it is becoming increasingly drier in Central Europe and that extra dry periods occur at approximately five-hundred-year intervals.
What these droughts are due to, before the man-made greenhouse gas emissions began to heat the earth, is not entirely clear, but scientists believe it may be due in part to subtle changes in the earth’s orbit.
But apart from being able to Putting the current drought in Central Europe in a historical context, Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist believes that this study can also be used to predict the future. By allowing global climate models to be tested against actual climate data, which becomes a way to test which climate models actually reflect reality and which do not.
– You can compare with climate models and which factors in climate models must be present for them to be able to reproduce this type of drought periods in the models. And the models that do not manage it are probably worse, says Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist.
Reference
Bรผntgen, U., Urban, O., Krusic, PJ et al. Recent European drought extremes beyond Common Era background variability. Nat. Geosci. (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00698-0
Source: ICELAND NEWS