 Recent years have seen a number of severe droughts in various regions around the world, leading to agricultural and economic losses, famine and migration. Despite their devastating consequences, the standardized precipitation index, SPI, of these events falls within the range of observations and simulations from the fifth phase of the coupled model intercomparison project, CMIP5. In terms of magnitude, regional trends of SPI over the past decades remain largely inconclusive in observation-based data sets in CMIP5 simulations, but soil moisture anomalies, SMAs, in CMIP5 simulations suggest increased drought in a few regions, the Mediterranean, Central America slash Mexico, the Amazon, Northeast Brazil, and South Africa. Similarly, projections of changes in the magnitude of meteorological, SPI, and soil moisture, SMA, drought in CMIP5 display large spreads over all timeframes, generally impeding trend detection. However, projections of changes in the frequencies of future drought events display more robust signal-to-noise ratios, with detectable trends towards more frequent drought before the end. This article was authored by B. Orlowski and S. I. Senevirotin.