TY - GEN A1 - Shah, Jignesh A1 - Hari, Vittal A1 - Rakovec, Oldrich A1 - Markonis, Yannis A1 - Samaniego, Luis A1 - Mishra, Vimal A1 - Hanel, Martin A1 - Hinz, Christoph A1 - Kumar, Rohini T1 - Increasing footprint of climate warming on flash droughts occurrence in Europe T2 - Environmental Research Letters N2 - Flash droughts are caused by a rapid depletion of soil moisture, and they severely affect vegetation growth and agricultural production. Notwithstanding the growing importance of flash droughts under the warming climate, drivers of flash droughts across the Europe are not well understood. Here we estimate the changes in flash droughts characteristics across Europe using the ERA5 reanalysis dataset for 1950–2019 period. We find a substantial increase in the frequency and spatial extent of flash droughts across Europe (with 79% of the total area) during the growing season with at-least one fourth of domain showing two-fold increase in the recent decades. Increased occurrence of flash drought is largely attributed to frequent occurrence of warmer and drier compound extremes, with a sharp gradient of changes being noticed in Mediterranean and Central European regions. Compound meteorological extremes causing the flash drought events across Europe are pre-dominantly driven by the recent climate warming. With unabated greenhouse gas emissions and current pace of climate warming, Europe is likely to face an increased occurrence of flash droughts, requiring prompt response for effective drought adaptation and management strategies. KW - Europe KW - flash droughts KW - climate warming KW - ERA5 KW - soil moisture Y1 - 2022 UR - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac6888 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac6888 SN - 1748-9326 VL - 17 IS - 6 ER -