Europe has experienced severe drought events in recent decades, with the diverse distribution of vegetation, varied drought characteristics, and other concurrent hydroclimatic factors making it challenging to understand how vegetation responds to drought. To shed light on this issue, we use an ensemble of vegetation growth indicators to analyze the instantaneous vegetation response to meteorological drought across European biomes. We find increased vegetation sensitivity to drought along canopy development during a year, with mean sensitivities rising from ‒0.01 in spring to 0.28 in autumn and the percentage of drought-susceptible areas rising from 18.5% to 57.8% across European biomes. Temporally, the sensitivity of vegetation growth to meteorological drought is exacerbated by soil water shortage. Spatially, the vegetation-drought sensitivity is related to vapor pressure deficit (ensemble mean correlation coefficients 0.71–0.87) and partly to atmospheric CO2 concentration with dependencies on the maturity of the canopy (correlations ‒0.34 in spring and 0.81 in autumn), but only weakly to soil moisture (correlations 0.06–0.19). Our results highlight the spatiotemporal variations of vegetation-drought associations and sensitivities, as well as the roles of concurrent hydroclimatic factors. These patterns may have important implications for atmospheric carbon reduction, ecosystem stability, biodiversity conservation, and vegetation feedback on regional climate.
