Summary/Abstract
Prolonged summer droughts represent a significant threat across Europe, as their persistence hinders hydrological recovery and severely impacts water resources, ecosystems, and agricultural systems under ongoing warming. Here, the authors investigated the 2018–2022 European multi-year drought across different warming levels using an innovative storyline attribution framework, applying nudged AWI-CM-1-1-MR simulations to force the mesoscale Hydrologic Model. Under present-day climate, the 2018–2022 drought caused a soil-moisture deficit of −44 (±11.1) km3, affecting 0.63 (±0.08) million km2 (12% of the study area). The 2018–2022 multi-year soil moisture state would overall show a surplus roughly 1.5 times the magnitude of the present-day deficit, with less than half of the area still experiencing drought. With warming of 2 K or 4 K, the losses increase to −82 (±6.7) or −256 (±6.7) km3, while drought extent expands to approximately 16% or 43%. These findings highlight that higher warming levels intensify multi-year droughts, both broadening their spatial footprint and deepening their severity. As warming transforms single-year droughts into extended multi-year events, their prolonged impacts underscore the need for effective climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.