The drought affecting central Europe, UK and Scandinavia in 2018 was one of the strongest in the past decade, and compares in severity to the 2003 and 2010 extremes. Unlike the other events though, this drought affected regions that seldom experience strong drought (e.g. Scandinavia and UK), and differs from the other events in the climate anomalies in the preceding spring. The 2018 extreme spring and summer provides therefore an opportunity to learn about the responses of high-latitude ecosystems to temperature and water-stress conditions that might become more frequent in the future, and evaluate compensating effects between warm springs and warm, dry summers. I will present results of different studies combining information from remote-sensing, eddy-covariance flux measurements, atmospheric inversions and process-based models.