Carl Hartick, Carina Furusho, Klaus Goergen, Stefan Kollet

The year 2018 was one of the hottest and driest years in Europe having a large impact on agriculture, ecosystems and society. The associated drought in central and northern Europe underpins the need for water resources predictions at the seasonal to interannual time scale. In this study, we propose a probabilistic, terrestrial prediction system including water resources utilizing the Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform, TSMP. Based on an existing climatology from 1996 to 2018, a probabilistic prediction for the water year 2018/19 was performed accounting for atmospheric uncertainty in an ensemble approach. The results show that the water year 2017/18 is an outlier with respect to dry conditions considering all available years of the climatology. The prediction shows that, on average, the water deficit will not be alleviated until the end of 2019 and that there is a higher probability for anomalously dry conditions. However, the current trajectory obtained from a simulation applying recent atmospheric reanalysis data is located in the dry tail of the ensemble potentially indicating a continuation of a severe drought in future.