A drought climatology for Europe

Abstract We present a high spatial resolution, multi‐temporal climatology for the incidence of 20th century European drought. The climatology provides, for a given location or region, the time series of drought strength, the number, the mean duration, and the maximum duration of droughts of a given intensity, and the trend in drought incidence. The drought climatology is based on monthly standardized precipitation indices (SPIs) calculated on a 0.5° grid over the European region 35–70 °N and 35 °E–10 °W at time scales of 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24 months for the period 1901–99. The standardized property facilitates the quantitative comparison of drought incidence at different locations and over different time…