Projected changes in droughts and extreme droughts in Great Britain are strongly influenced by the choice of drought index: UKCP18-based bias adjusted potential evapotranspiration

Potential evapotranspiration calculated from the UKCP18 RCM ensemble using the Penman-Monteith method as implemented by Robinson et al. (2017) and bias adjusted using Lange et al. (2019). This dataset was used for analysis of future drought characteristics in Reyniers et al. (2022). Details on the bias adjustment of this potential evapotranspiration dataset, as well as bias-adjusted precipitation and temperature from the same climate model ensemble, can be found in Reyniers et al. (2025). --- Reyniers, N., Osborn, T. J., Addor, N., and Darch, G.: Projected changes in droughts and extreme droughts in Great Britain strongly influenced by the choice of drought index, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 27, 1151–1171, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-27-1151-2023, 2023. Reyniers, N., Zha, Q., Addor, N., Osborn, T. J., Forstenhäusler, N., and He, Y.: Two sets of bias-corrected regional UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) of temperature, precipitation and potential evapotranspiration for Great Britain, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 2113–2133, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-2113-2025, 2025. Robinson, E. L., Blyth, E. M., Clark, D. B., Finch, J., Rudd, A. C. (2017). Trends in atmospheric evaporative demand in Great Britain using high-resolution meteorological data. HESS, 21(2), 1189-1224. Lange, S. (2019). Trend-preserving bias adjustment and statistical downscaling with ISIMIP3BASD (v1. 0). GMD, 12(7), 3055-3070.