Soil moisture drought reconstruction across Europe since 1766

Data repository for: <strong>Rakovec, O., Samaniego, L., Hari, V., Markonis, Y., Moravec, V., Thober, S., Hanel, M., Kumar, R. (2022). The 2018-2020 multi-year drought sets a new benchmark in Europe. doi: </strong>10.1029/2021EF002394 If you use this dataset in scientific publications, the aforementioned publication needs to be acknowledged. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We provide a comprehensive spatio-temporal assessment of the drought hazard over Europe by benchmarking past exceptional events during the period from 1766-2020. We provide gridded soil moisture simulations of the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM; Samaniego et al., 2010; Kumar et al., 2013) in NetCDF format, transformed into a percentile-based monthly soil moisture index (SMI; Samaniego et al., 2013): (1) Observation-based simulations of SMI from mHM: <strong>smi_dataset_obs_based.tar.gz: m</strong>eteorologic forcings are based on 1766–2015 (Casty et al., 2007; ) and E-OBS v21 (Hofstra et al., 2009). (2) Climate model-based simulations of SMI from mHM: <strong>smi_dataset_gcm_based.tar.gz</strong> This suite is based on five Coupled Model Intercomparison Project v5 (CMIP5) Global Climate Models (GCMs) (HadGEM2-ES, IPSL-CM5A-LR, MIROC-ESM-CHEM, GFDL-ESM2M and NorESM1-M) in the historical mode and under two future representative concentration pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5), available from the ISI-MIP project (Hempel et al., 2013; Warszawski et al., 2014; Frieler et al., 2017) mHM code is available under: https://git.ufz.de/mhm/mhm, revision number: 8271b54 SMI code is available under: https://git.ufz.de/chs/progs/SMI, -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <em>Following variables are provided in the netcdf format:</em> float <strong>SMI</strong>(time, ncols, nrows) ; <strong>SMI:long_name</strong> = "soil moisture index" ; int <strong>mSMIc</strong>(time, ncols, nrows) ; <strong>mSMIc:long_name</strong> = "monthly SMI indicator SMI &lt; th" ; int <strong>mDC</strong>(time, ncols, nrows) ; <strong>mDC:long_name</strong> = "consolidated cluster evolution" ; Aggregated analysis of the soil moisture drought clusters is presented in ascii files: <strong>results_ADM_yyyymm.txt</strong> <strong>i </strong>- running index of clusters <strong>c_Id </strong>- IDs of cluster <strong>mStart</strong> - starting month <strong>mEnd</strong> - ending month <strong>aDD</strong> - average Drought Duration <strong>aDA</strong> - average Drought Area <strong>TDM</strong> - Total Drought Magnitude -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This study was done within the XEROS project (eXtreme EuRopean drOughtS: multimodel synthesis of past, present and future events), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant RA 3235/1‐1) and Czech Science Foundation (grant 19‐24089J) -- www.ufz.de/xeros