KAZALCI OKOLJA

Key message
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The frequency of agricultural drought in Slovenia has been increasing in recent decades. In the last twenty years, we have recorded 6 droughts that affected Slovenia at the scale of a natural disaster. Drought is occurring with increasing intensity and in areas and seasons where there have been no problems in the past. An additional risk for agricultural drought are rapidly developing droughts in summer ("flash droughts"), which occur especially during heat waves. Projections show that trend of increasing frequency and intensity of agricultural drought will continue in the future.pp


Charts

Figure PP14-1: Values of average summer meteorological water balance for Slovenia in the period 1981-2021 and number of regions with exceptional agricultural drought in an individual year (above) and intensity of summer agricultural drought, expressed by percentile class by region in period 1961-2020 per region (below)
Sources:

Slovenian Environment Agency, 2021 (14. 06. 2021)

Note:

In the upper of the two graphs, the column size corresponds to values of average summer meteorological water balance for Slovenia in individual years, the number below the column represents the number of regions with extreme agricultural drought that year, the column colour indicates the spatial extent of extreme drought conditions in Slovenia, and the stripes are added on columns for years when drought was declared a natural disaster on the basis of Natural Disaster Recovery Act. The spatial dimension of exceptional agricultural drought does not necessarily coincide with the size of the average water balance deficit for Slovenia or the government declaration of drought as a national disaster. For example, in 2007 water balance deficit was recorded for Slovenia, however it was more or less evenly distributed, so no region experienced a water balance deficit that would exceed 95th percentile. A similar range of deficit for Slovenia was recorded in 2006, but it was mostly present in one region where deficit exceeded 95th percentile. This can also be seen from the lower of the two graphs in Figure 1 above, in which drought intensity is expressed in percentileclass of summer meteorological water balance at representative regional stations. The number of extremely dry regions per year in the lower part Figure 1 is consistent with the number in the upper part of Figure 1. The agricultural drought indicator clearly shows concentration of droughts as well as an increase in spatial dimension of extreme droughts since year 2000. In that period, drought was most severe in years 2003, 2013 and 2017.

Show data
  1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021
mm 73,9 -32,3 89,3 91,1 186,3 160,4 -74,8 146,5 214,4 80,1 -50,3 127,2 16,7 157,4 180,3 -10,8 119,5 86,4 84,6 122,4 45,3 90,6 -82,5 6,3 73,1 118,3 69,1 0,4 165,4 38,6 25,6 -115,1 -84,9 -20,7 74 27,7 44,1 22,8 53,4 -143,2 -146,8 37,4 -205,8 61,4 116,4 -45,8 -50 86,9 -26,2 -19,6 -40,5 -140,6 -215,7 118,2 -92,2 -22,1 -154,7 -38,2 -117,9 58,4 -147,9
numner of regions 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 0 10 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 4 9 0 1 0 6 0 2 0 3

Methodology

Date of data source summarization

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