Climate models project an overall aridification of the Mediterranean environment at the end of the 21st century, mostly linked to the expansion of the subtropical edge of the Hadley circulation. During the transition towards a subtropicalised mean climate state, the characteristics of extreme events will change. Prolonged droughts (months-to-years), such as the one observed in 2022 over Italy and Europe, are expected to become more frequent (5 to 10 times more than recent past) and severe at the end of the 21st century.
Previous studies on future Mediterranean climate mostly focused on long-term mean changes. Furthermore, past analyses of Mediterranean droughts and extremes have been limited by availability of sufficient observational and model datasets to perform rigorous detection and attribution analysis. Instead, DROMEDAR will rely on large ensembles, a definitive tool for the study of extreme events, because they allow us to explore climate signals beyond the influence of the internal variability.