Protection against extreme weather events: Meteorologists want to predict dry and wet conditions more accurately

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Thunderstorm cell over Baden-Württemberg

Photo: Martin Grimm / BIA / IMAGO

Drought and heavy rain events are becoming more frequent and more intense due to man-made climate change. The German Weather Service (DWD) now wants to use an early warning system to help affected regions prepare for this. Especially since 2018, there have been extremely dry years with high crop failures, a lot of forest dieback and numerous floods on parched ground.

With soil moisture forecasts for two to five weeks and for the next six months, farmers, foresters and disaster control should be able to better adapt to particularly dry or wet conditions. The third forecast map covers a period of up to ten years. On the freely accessible maps, the temperature, precipitation and soil moisture can be viewed for the respective time periods. Soil moisture is about the water content of the soil up to 60 centimeters deep.

»An early warning system “soil moisture” is important for disaster control in order to prepare protective measures against floods. This means that agriculture and forestry can prepare for drought hazards such as drought or forest fires at an early stage," explained Tobias Fuchs, climate director of the DWD, on Tuesday morning in Berlin. There is a big difference whether the ground is averagely moist when heavy rain is forecast and can still absorb rain or is already so wet that the precipitation runs off completely on the surface.

According to the DWD, the forecasts are calculated from evaporation and the soil water balance. All forecasts show the “probability of occurrence of high, normal and low soil moisture in comparison to a reference period of many years in the past”. The quality of the predictions is also stated. »This also helps to better prepare Germany for the changes caused by global warming. They are a contribution from the National Weather Service to adapting to climate change,” says Fuchs.

Predictions are also important for the energy industry

The energy industry is also increasingly dependent on weather forecasts, such as favorable wind conditions or hours of sunshine. They therefore also want to provide “reliable information about future developments in wind and solar”. “From a meteorological perspective, 2023 was a successful year for the use of renewable energies in Germany,” explained Renate Hagedorn, Vice President and Head of Weather Forecasting at the DWD.

In Germany and worldwide, 2023 was also the warmest year since weather records began. The annual mean temperature in Germany was 10.6 degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record from 2018. »This is remarkable because, in contrast to the summer of 2022, the summer of 2023 did not have a particularly large number of heat waves. The record is mainly due to an extremely mild winter and an above-average warm autumn with a record September," said Andreas Becker, head of climate monitoring at the DWD. »Climate change is still continuing unchecked. We should therefore both persistently expand climate protection and, through prevention and climate adaptation, enable ourselves to mitigate the damage caused by potentially increasingly severe weather extremes.

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