Droughts

Many people consider droughts to be rare, but in fact they are a normal and recurrent feature of the climate. Drought events are regional phenomena, affecting transnational water management. Unfortunately, droughts have a high damage potential: economic losses, ecological damages, and implications on human health.
Due to the hot and dry summer many parts of the Danube Basin where characterised by droughts in 2003.

What are droughts?

When asked to define drought, there isn't just one right answer. Many different definitions exist. Drought implies a lack of moisture for an extended period of time which in turns causes a deficit of moisture in the soil. This can mean different things for different areas. For areas which receive high amounts of precipitation (rain, snow), a condition of drought can develop more rapidly than in an area which doesn't.

Many problems can arise due to droughts, including crop damage and water supply shortage. How severe a drought is depends mostly on the degree of the deficiency, the time period, and the size of the area affected. The timing is also a significant factor with the duration of droughts.

Did you know?

Often, long-term droughts are a problem in the same areas that are endangered by flooding.

Droughts result from a combination of meteorological, physical and human factors. Their primary cause is a deficiency in rainfall and the timing, distribution and intensity of this deficiency in relation to existing storage, demand and water use. Temperature and evapotranspiration may act in combination with insufficient rainfall to magnify the severity and duration of droughts. Moreover, due to changes in land use, water demand and climate the droughts in future may become more frequent and more severe.

In short, some examples in the Danube River Basin:

Some more information on the droughts in 2003

Contrary to 2002 a remarkable deficit in rain and snow was reported by the Danube countries in 2003. In Germany a long-term drought between February and September was caused by the accumulation and stability of anticyclone weather conditions. Hence the air temperature and sunshine duration exceeded the annual mean values and altogether ten months of the year were drier than average.

Did you know?

The total loss of water from plant transpiration and evaporation form the ground is high in several parts of the Danube basin and may even be higher than the amount of snow and rain falling from the sky. Such droughts can be observed along the Tisza river.

Many gauging stations in Germany recorded the hottest summer ever observed. In the other upstream countries low precipitation (rain, snow) and excessive temperatures were reported in 2003 as well.

The overall water deficit in the upper Danube was partly compensated by increased glacial water due to excessive melting in the alpine regions.

But in general, in 2003 the Danube was withering away. At the end of the summer, the water level fell to the lowest levels over a century, stranding ships and barges from Southern Germany to the Romanian lowlands. Romania's Cernavoda Nuclear Power plant, which draws coolant water from the Danube, was forced to shut down for nearly a month.

In the lower part of the Danube Basin the weather was also warmer when compared to the average climatic pattern as it can be seen from the example showing monthly average temperatures in Romania.

Average monthly air temperature variation in Romania in 2003 compared to the long term average pattern 1961-1990.

This climatic phenomen influenced also the temperature of the surface waters. In the summer period, the monthly average water temperature of the Danube at Bezdan (Serbia and Montenegro) exceeded the maximum-recorded values. In Hungary, the dry season caused even a significant decrease of water levels of the two biggest natural lakes - Lake Balaton and Lake Velence.

The values of the total precipitation (rain, snow) in 2003 as well as the relative precipitation (compared to a long-term annual average) in some countries are shown below:

What is done to cope with droughts?

The Joint Research Center of the European Commission (being actively involved in the work of the ICPDR) is developing a set of droughts indicators, incorporating the impact of water stress on the natural vegetation and on agriculture. This also includes the production of a soil moisture and plant water stress map (using the so called LISFLOOD model). The LISFLOOD model has been specifically developed to simulate floods in large European drainage basins. Full basin-scale simulations can be carried out in such a way that influences of land use, spatial variations of soil properties and spatial precipitation differences, e.g. by increased flood frequency through climatic change, are taken into account .

The objective is to carry out a feasibility study on drought modelling for Europe, using a test region within the Danube catchment area as an example. This study will draw recommendations for the future development of a European Drought Alert System.

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