Abstract
Southern Europe has experienced increasingly frequent and severe droughts in recent decades, yet long‐term station‐based assessments remain limited for Greece. Here, we develop a station‐based, multi‐timescale drought climatology for Greece (1960–2022) using daily precipitation and temperature observations from 67 homogenized Hellenic National Meteorological Service (HNMS) stations. Drought conditions are quantified with the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) at 1‐, 3‐, 6‐, 9‐, and 12‐month accumulation periods to represent meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological drought types. We analyze long‐term SPI/SPEI trends and breakpoint timing, station‐wide drought extent, and assess the temporal divergence between precipitation‐only SPI and the water‐balance‐based SPEI. The results reveal a spatially heterogeneous and non‐stationary drought regime across Greece. Most stations exhibit decreasing SPI/SPEI trends, indicating a shift towards drier conditions, with statistically significant trends for a large fraction of sites, particularly for SPEI, indicating that warming enhances drought detection and intensification. Droughts have become more spatially extensive in recent decades, affecting a larger fraction of the station network simultaneously compared with earlier periods. Direct SPI and SPEI comparison further reveal a persistent divergence during the most recent decade. Although SPI and SPEI differences alternated between positive and negative phases over much of the record, the most recent decade is characterized by consistently lower SPEI values across most of the network. Beyond documenting recent drought intensification, this study provides a long‐term, homogenized, station‐based observational benchmark for Greece by integrating SPI and SPEI across five accumulation timescales and multiple drought dimensions within a single national framework. The results show that including atmospheric evaporative demand systematically strengthens the detected drying signal relative to precipitation‐only assessment, underlining the value of temperature‐sensitive drought monitoring for climate‐risk assessment and adaptation planning in Greece.