DelegatePack_DroughtConference_20-21March2019

Speakers
Day 1: Plenary – The Pichette Auditorium
Jamie Hannaford CEH
Welcome to the ENDOWS Programme
The Drought and Water Scarcity (DWS) Programme is a major interdisciplinary research programme funded by
NERC, ESRC, EPSRC, BBRC and AHRC. The Programme commenced in 2014 and ends in 2019 and is now in the final
phase, a knowledge exchange project called ENDOWS (Engaging Diverse stakeholders and publics with outputs from
the Drought and Water Scarcity Programme). This presentation will illustrate how ENDOWS is working with a very
diverse stakeholder community to exploit the datasets, models and methodologies developed within the DWS
programme to develop tools and guidance for improved drought management. ENDOWS is structured into various
sectoral workstreams (water supply; agriculture; environment; business; communities). A key focus of this presentation
will be on how ENDOWS is developing methodologies for long-term drought and water resources planning (e.g. the
development of national, consistent ‘Drought Libraries’ and national-scale hydrological and water supply system
models) to support the current drive towards more integrated regional- and national-scale water resources planning.
The talk also illustrates how ENDOWS is enhancing operational drought management through improved monitoring
and early warning of drought, and how this is being co-developed with stakeholders during the ongoing dry weather in
2018. Various other sectoral applications will then be highlighted through examples. Finally, the talk will discuss the
innovative approaches being developed to ensure the vast amount of data being generated by the programme are
readily accessible to the community.
Henny van Lanen Wageningen University & Research
The 2018 NW European Drought: warnings from an extreme event
Last year Europe was hit again by a severe drought, particularly north-western countries suffered. It became apparent
to a wider public that droughts and associated water shortages are not solely preserved for the Mediterranean.
Moreover, drought projections increased concerns. A high pressure system above Scandinavia kept depressions
causing rain at distance and dry and warm air masses were transported to NW Europe. This weather circulation type
is not uncommon for the region, but in 2018 it appeared to be very persistent and lasted several months. Several
temperature records were broken, the climatological water deficit exceeded the driest on record in some countries,
and significantly affected the water system. Not surprisingly, a wide range of impacts was reported. Drought, as a
natural hazard cannot be prevented. However, people are challenged to minimize socio-economic and environmental
impacts. An analysis of management of the 2018 drought learnt that not everything was in order everywhere. It was
found that monitoring of hydrological variables is not targeted to drought, but in NW European countries it is biased
towards floods. Usually the monitoring puts more emphasis on surface water than groundwater. Impact minimization
also requires seasonal hydrological drought forecasting. Use of these forecasts is largely underdeveloped by lots of
practitioners. Monitoring and forecast data are hard to obtain, which is meant to avoid panic among the public.
Interaction between social and more conventional media helped to expose these data. Development of drought
management plans is a rather slow process that takes years, which cannot be speeded up to cope with an emerging
drought. Findings from the 2018 drought should warn policy-makers and water managers to increase preparedness
and (i) to take existing scientific knowledge more quickly on board (e.g. seasonal forecasting), (ii) to target monitoring
more to drought, (iii) to equally balance between surface water and groundwater, and (iv) to make data better
accessible. We also learnt that the academic community should progress on: (i) drought impact forecasting rather than
only hazard forecasting, (ii) including drought in a multi-hazard setting, and to improve knowledge on droughtgenerating
processes and modelling.
Len Shaffrey NCAS, University of Reading
Has climate change increased the chance of events like the 1976 North West European drought
occurring?
The 1976 NW European summertime drought was preceded by a sustained dry spell through the winter and spring of
1975 and 1976. The summer of 1976 was characterised by a continuation of the dry spell combined with an extreme
heatwave. The combination of heat and lack of water had numerous impacts across many sectors including public
health, agriculture and water resource management. Understanding how climate change might be impacting on the
frequency or severity of extreme events is a question of interest to water resource managers, regulators and the
general public. In this study, climate model experiments have been performed to assess whether climate change is
increasing the probability that events like the 1976 North West European might occur again. These experiments
suggest that increased anthropogenic forcing since the 1970s has dramatically increased the probability of
summertime heat waves. However, climate change has also decreased the probability of an extended winter and
spring dry spell preceding a summertime drought. The combined effect of climate change on temperatures and rainfall
is that an event such as the 1976 North West European drought is substantially more likely in the present-day climate
compared to the 1970s.
Rob Wilby Loughborough
Challenging the mantra of wetter winters, drier summers in the UK
My talk will draw upon a recent re-examination of the widely adopted EWP series, and constituent records, led by
Conor Murphy at Maynooth. I will also refer to other work that I have done on evaluating rare droughts from historic
records, as part of the approach now implemented by UK water companies in their drought resilience planning.