According to the maps of your intersucho.cz project, the Czech Republic is doing quite well with soil moisture saturation. So are we out of the water for this year?
It depends on which part it is. Drought is now affecting much of western and central Europe. In this context, the Czechia, especially southern and central Bohemia, is slightly better off than the rest of Western and Central Europe. Things are a bit better here now thanks to the rain we’ve had in the last two weeks.
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But the drought in Moravia remains the same as in northwestern Bohemia. And in the horizon of the next ten days, it looks like the situation will return to the drought values that we had sometime in May.
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Is there a threat of another wave of drought, as in the years 2015 to 2020?
The current episode of drought begins after a not entirely favorable winter, but then again after two years when conditions were not so bad. We see clear evidence of hydrometeorological drought, for example we have low flows especially in the east and northwest of the territory. It can be seen that the soil moisture is not doing well.
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On the other hand, the vegetation is in relatively good condition from the point of view of the republic as a whole. I hope there’s still time to expect some extremely harsh repercussions. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen to us considering all the worries we have now. But that’s more of a wish. Our correspondents are already drawing attention to the deteriorating situation in their reports.
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Climatologist Miroslav Trnka from the Global Change Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Photo: Facebook AV CR
Optimistic forecasts have softened after the high temperatures of late June. And with that next wave coming our way in the next few days, we’re going to see more drought impacts in terms of vegetation and agricultural crops.
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The situation will be similar to the west of us, in Germany and France. There, the drought does damage. They are also seen in Hungary and Slovakia. In fact, if we take the region most affected by the anomaly of lack of moisture in the global context, it is Europe.
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What are the causes?
A specific drought episode is the impact of weather developments in the previous weeks or months. We had an unusually warm winter. Virtually all precipitation in the middle and lower elevations was rain, not snow. So what would normally be left as a reserve for the beginning of spring to replenish groundwater supplies has already run off or evaporated over the course of the winter. And this is a phenomenon that we can definitely attribute to climate change.
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A skeptic would argue that the drought was longer or shorter in the past as well…
In Central Europe, it is beyond doubt that climate change is a factor making drought more difficult than in the past.
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In general, with climate change, the occurrence of drought is more likely. If we define the climate conditions for the previous 40 years by the usual state, then if each successive year is on average warmer than the previous year in the time series, then we see that drought is more likely than in previous years. Especially if the precipitation has a changed structure, which is exactly what we observe. And not only here, but also in California, South America. There are dozens of regions with similar problems as the Czechia.
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And every other extreme that comes tends to be slightly worse in the case of a water deficit.
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In general, the link between drought and climate change is proven.
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The situation in our country will be similar to that in Germany, Hungary or Slovakia, where drought causes damage
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But how is it that right here is the wet island, while everywhere else is dry?
The damp island isn’t that big. It’s nothing that should surprise us. Summer precipitation in Central Europe is typically more local or regional, it does not affect large areas. They are the consequences of storms or their systems that do not affect a very large area. In the current episode, it’s nice to see that if you look at the soil saturation map, it’s rainbow colored. It is rare to see that we have all soil moisture categories from fully saturated to completely dry soil on a stretch of several tens of kilometers from the Novohradské Hory to South Moravia.
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This is a result of regional differences in rainfall, but is not unusual. Professionally, we are extremely interested in this, because it changes the image of drought as a rather boring phenomenon that flatly occupies large areas. Now it appears as a more varied and structured climatological phenomenon.
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But in general it can be said that the occurrence of drought is dependent on the combination of the water supply at the beginning of the season, which was low, and the course of the weather. And the smaller the water supply in the soil at the beginning, the more it depends on the precipitation whether it will be dry or not. And since precipitation is variable, so is drought.
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So can we rule out the possibility that water is maintained here thanks to better water management, with its retention in the landscape?
If this were true, then we would not be able to see what we see on the European map. The whole of Europe is affected by the drought, including countries that have not experienced the nationalization of land, the severing of relations with the land, and where they are managed in a way that we would like to at least partially take over.
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Managing my land well will help me locally. Farms in Germany, Austria, but also some in the Czech Republic, which have managed water and soil responsibly for decades, are better off than their neighbors who, under the same conditions, farm in a less than optimal way.
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But it must be said that the change in management in the landscape is not able to pass the climate signal. This is the illusion of our influence on overall climate conditions through the transformation of agricultural technology. We change the climate much more by changing the composition of the atmosphere and by polluting it. Farming in the countryside only improves or worsens the consequences of climate change.
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The signal is dominant and homogeneous from Portugal, through France, Germany to Slovakia and Poland. All countries are going through very similar conditions and we are seeing a lack of moisture in all of them. Somewhere bigger, somewhere smaller, it depends on the infrastructure, what crops they grow, in what part of the vegetation cycle it caught them. But the effects are seen everywhere.
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Is there reason for optimism when even China has already declared carbon neutrality by 2060? Does the world take it seriously anymore?
This is a clear demonstration that there are certainly reasons for optimism. But the war in Ukraine, for example, is much more burning and vehement now, but we must not forget that the problem of climate change will not disappear with the war, just as, unfortunately, it did not disappear with the end of the Cold War.
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The fact that a number of countries are beginning to perceive the greenhouse gas balance as a fundamental issue is due to the fact that when the large economies in particular have calculated what costs may fall on them if they do not go down this path, it is more reasonable to invest in new technologies.
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One thing is the moral and environmental responsibility of Europe, on the other hand, in the case of China, it is a clear economic and commercial calculation. They can calculate that countries that adopt strict emission limits will not want to import products from countries that have less strict limits. Otherwise, there would be a spillover of emissions to countries that have more delicate legislation. But Europe is a big trading partner.
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And then the development of modern technologies also plays a role. When economies focus on carbon-saving energies, it gives them an advantage in the market. Or, on the contrary, it makes some technologies unsellable and unusable. In the USA, for example, it has reached such proportions that many traditional American car brands are unsellable on the European markets, because they have such emissions and such consumption that no one would support it here.
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