Regional Differences in Spatiotemporal Drought Characteristics in Great Britain

Despite being one of the most damaging natural hazards, droughts and their spatiotemporal dynamics are typically not well understood. Great Britain, which is focus this work, has experienced many major drought episodes in past, causing a range socioeconomic environmental impacts. Here, we apply recently developed technique to identify characterise past droughts, using space-time connectivity extract events from monthly gridded precipitation dataset covering 1862–2015, without imposing fixed geographical boundaries or time-frames. For each grid cell, data was aggregated into four new time series moving averages over 3-, 6-, 12- 24-month windows. These reflect response times for different types Drought were then extracted window separately. In order assess regional differences characteristics, assigned three regions: South-East (SE), North-West (NW) “Transition” region in-between them. A frequency analysis characteristics (duration, area, intensity severity) highlighted between short medium accumulation periods (3, 6, 12 months), less severe more frequent NW than SE, whereas long, spatially extended SE NW. However, long (24 fewer observed SE. region, other two regions. timeline historic detected by our method included vast majority known previous studies, with few additional ones, shed important light on relative severity these historical episodes. Finally, an spatial coherence regions showed that extreme presented little coherence, tend be coherent. This implications water resources planning management strategies, particularly given increasing emphasis inter-regional transfers as potential solution situations drought.