Heatwaves, droughts, and fires: Exploring compound and cascading dry hazards at the pan-European scale

Samuel Jonson Sutanto; Claudia Vitolo; Claudia Di Napoli; Mirko D'Andrea; Henny A J Van Lanen

doi:10.1016/j.envint.2019.105276

Heatwaves, droughts, and fires: Exploring compound and cascading dry hazards at the pan-European scale

Environ Int. 2020 Jan:134:105276. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2019.105276. Epub 2019 Nov 11.

Authors

Samuel Jonson Sutanto¹, Claudia Vitolo², Claudia Di Napoli³, Mirko D'Andrea⁴, Henny A J Van Lanen⁵

Affiliations

¹ Hydrology and Water Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Droevendaalsesteeg 3a, 6708PB, Wageningen, the Netherlands. Electronic address: samuel.sutanto@wur.nl.
² Forecast Department, ECMWF, Reading, UK.
³ Forecast Department, ECMWF, Reading, UK; School of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
⁴ CIMA Research Foundation, Savona, Italy.
⁵ Hydrology and Water Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Droevendaalsesteeg 3a, 6708PB, Wageningen, the Netherlands.

PMID: 31726364
DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2019.105276

Abstract

Compound and cascading natural hazards usually cause more severe impacts than any of the single hazard events alone. Despite the significant impacts of compound hazards, many studies have only focused on single hazards. The aim of this paper is to investigate spatio-temporal patterns of compound and cascading hazards using historical data for dry hazards, namely heatwaves, droughts, and fires across Europe. We streamlined a simple methodology to explore the occurrence of such events on a daily basis. Droughts in soil moisture were analyzed using time series of a threshold-based index, obtained from the LISFLOOD hydrological model forced with observations. Heatwave and fire events were analyzed using the ERA5-based temperature and Fire Weather Index datasets. The data used in this study relates to the summer seasons from 1990 to 2018. Our results show that joint dry hazard occurrences were identified in west, central, and east Europe, and with a lower frequency in southern Europe and eastern Scandinavia. Drought plays a substantial role in the occurrence of the compound and cascading events of dry hazards, especially in southern Europe as it drives duration of cascading events. Moreover, drought is the most frequent hazard-precursor in cascading events, followed by compound drought-fire events. Changing the definition of a cascading dry hazard by increasing the number of days without a hazard from 1 to 21 within the event (inter-event criterion), lowers as expected, the maximum number of cascading events from 94 to 42, and extends the maximum average duration of cascading events from 38 to 86 days. We had to use proxy observed data to determine the three selected dry hazards because long time series of reported dry hazards do not exist. A complete and specific database with reported hazards is a prerequisite to obtain a more comprehensive insight into compound and cascading dry hazards.

Keywords: Concurrent events; Historical data; Multi hazard; Sequent events.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Droughts*
Europe
Fires*
Weather