1540 European drought

The 1540 drought in Europe was a climatic event in Europe. In various palaeoclimatic analyses the temperature and precipitation regimes were reconstructed and compared to present-day conditions.
On the basis of historical records Wetter et al. (2014) derived that during an eleven-month period there was little rain in Europe, possibly qualifying as a megadrought. These conclusions however were questioned by Büntgen et al. (2015) on the basis of additional data (tree rings).
Orth et al. (2016) concluded that in summer 1540 the mean temperature was above the 1966-2015 mean and with a probability of 20% exceeded that of the 2003 summer.
Description.
The Swiss historian Christian Pfister described the events of 1540 in a newspaper interview:
From the city Münden there is a description of how year 1540 of the ducal wine vineyard at was "“so excellent“" that it was preferred to foreign wine.
In the Swiss village „ desperate people went over 500 m up and down in elevation every day, only to fill a few barrels of water in Lake Thun"."“