Description of groundwater droughts in the UK: 1890 to 2015

Droughts pose a threat to lives and livelihoods in many parts of the world and may also cause
significant problems in temperate areas, including in the UK; a humid country, but one marked
by significant regional and temporal/inter-annual variations in rainfall. For example, the recent
UK drought of 2010-2012 (Kendon et al., 2013) exemplified many of these challenges. Despite
its unusually abrupt termination, the drought had major impacts on agriculture, the environment
and recreation, and was the focus of extensive media and public debate.
As part of a NERC directed programme on Drought and Water Scarcity in the UK
(http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/funded/programmes/droughts/), a project to investigate and
characterise episodes of historic drought and water scarcity in the UK using a systems-based
study of drivers and impacts was awarded to a consortium led by the Centre for Ecology and
Hydrolgy (CEH) and including the BGS. The project started in 2014 and will run until 2018.
One of the aims of the study is to develop an inventory of droughts, including groundwater
droughts, in the UK.
This BGS report is the first contribution to the development of such an inventory and builds on
the work of Bloomfield and Marchant (2013) who through development of the Standardised
Groundwater level Index (SGI) were the first to systematically document groundwater droughts
in the UK using groundwater level time series since the late 19th C. In this report groundwater
drought events identified in those time series are explored further by placing them in the hydrometeorological
context and by describing their impacts as recorded in the literature of the time
and subsequently.
The work described in this report was undertaken by Mason Durant in January 2015 as part of
Research Assistant placement with BGS Groundwater Science Directorate, Wallingford.