However, the damage in nature has been visible for some time. Ever since he was a child, Erich Fischer has spent a few days every year in the Simplon region near the Italian border. His grandfather was a mountain farmer there, so he knows the area well. The situation in the region has never been anywhere near as bad as it is now, he reports. Hardly any mountain stream still carries water, which is why livestock farming in the Alps has already had to be stopped. “The lack of melt water and the lack of water reserves from the melted glaciers play a central role here,” he explains.
Climate change or coincidence?
The reason for the lack of rain over large parts of Europe is a weather situation that has been allowing warm Mediterranean and Saharan air to penetrate Central Europe for months. A low-pressure area over the Atlantic acts like a pump, while a high-pressure area over the continent blocks damp westerly winds. The pattern of this weather situation fits the trend of the past decades. So has climate change already changed the airflow over Europe? Erich Fischer was able to show in his analyzes that such blocking high pressure areas are piling up over Europe and have contributed to this extremely rapid warming in a global comparison. A study recently published in the journal Nature Communications comes to a similar conclusion. But whether climate change is really causing this trend is unclear, says Fischer. It could also be coincidence.
So far, climate models have tended to point to coincidence. Then the trend could weaken again, says Erich Fischer. However, this is a scientific debate that is far from over.
“Overall, it doesn’t look like the drought will end in the next month and a half”(Jan Weber, hydrologist)
If climate change changes the circulation of the atmosphere, the trend towards hot and dry years in Central Europe would continue rapidly. The bad news: Overall, says Fischer, summers in Central Europe are already at the upper end of the model forecasts. The rate at which average temperatures are rising is very high and globally unique.
For now, all that remains is the hope of a quick end to the possibly historic summer of 2022. For the first time in weeks, thick clouds are expected to appear in the sky these days, accompanied by showers and thunderstorms. A lot of rain would be good, but the weather models are again predicting a stable high pressure area over Central Europe for the last third of the month. Jan Weber also gives little hope for a sustained change in the weather. Together with his colleagues, he applies the long-term models of the European weather service regionally. “Overall, it doesn’t look as if the drought will end in the next month and a half,” says Weber. But at least some people in this dust-dry country will be able to smell the rain again – if only for a short moment.