The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) has published a study that outlines how the 2022 UK drought evolved and its impacts on water resources, wildlife and people, comparing the situation with previous droughts and considering whether or not it is an indication of future events.
An appraisal of the severity of the 2022 drought and its impacts
The paper, An appraisal of the severity of the 2022 drought and its impacts, was published by UKCEH staff Lucy Barker, Jamie Hannaford, Eugene Magee, Steve Turner, Catherine Sefton, Jonathan Evans and Magdalena Szczykulska. The study was carried out as part of UKCEH work funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, including the National Hydrological Monitoring Programme and CANARI.
The authors of the study, published in the Royal Meteorological Society journal Weather, said the impacts on water supply were relatively modest in terms of duration and areas affected. Like 2018, this was largely due to wetter winters before and after the drought.
They found that droughts like that of 2022 emphasize the need for improved real-time monitoring and forecasting systems. This would indicate the likely impacts and so help apply mitigation measures – such as restrictions on abstractions or efforts to safeguard the environment like fish rescues – at an early stage.
Increasing risk of UK droughts
According to the UKCEH, the UK will be increasingly tested by more droughts like that of 2022, and scientists who have analyzed that summer’s events emphasize the importance of being prepared for similar extreme weather in the future.
Summer 2022 was reportedly the joint hottest (with 2018) and fifth driest since the 1890s. The drought was found to have affected large parts of the country and was the worst in some areas since 1976. It was part of a wider European drought, believed to be the worst on the continent in 500 years.
The prolonged and extensive exceptional heat, dry soils and low river flows had impacts across much of the UK, including water restrictions – with six companies introducing hosepipe bans affecting around 20 million people – and restrictions on the navigation of waterways.
Extensive challenges for agriculture included low crop and milk yields, as well as dying grass in grazing fields that forced farmers to use winter food stores. The summer saw nearly 25,000 wildfires which spread easily across dry fields and also affected urban areas. Environmental impacts included algal blooms and fish kills.
A Level 4 heat-health alert was issued for the first time since its introduction in 2004, and there were an estimated 2,800 excess deaths of over 65-year-olds due to heat between June and August. According to the report, that summer’s events underline the UK’s continuing vulnerability to intense droughts associated with low spring/summer rainfall alongside very high temperatures – especially given that it followed shortly another intense summer drought in 2018.
Extreme weather
UKCEH hydrologist Jamie Hannaford, one of the authors of the study, said, “The 2022 drought posed significant challenges to water management and communication with the public given the speed of onset of drought conditions and impacts. It has provided water managers with an important stress test, enabling them to assess our resilience to the kind of extreme event that we will see much more of in the future.”
Hydrologists classify 2022 as a summer drought, which developed relatively quickly, as opposed to a multi-year drought driven by successive dry winters. While there is significant uncertainty about how multi-year droughts may evolve in the future, scientists are highly confident, based on modeling, that the UK will be increasingly tested by more droughts like that of 2022. Human-driven climate warming increases the risk of droughts like those in 2018 and 2022, associated with drier summers and higher temperatures.
In related news, the Department of Commerce and NOAA recently announced a US$26m investment over four years in the National Weather Service (NWS) National Mesonet Program and the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) to support the development of a transformative federal-state-private partnership to provide improved early warning for drought, flooding, fire and other natural hazards. Click here to read the full story.
