Climatic aftermath of the 1815 Tambora eruption in China

Abstract

The 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano led to the “Year without a Summer” and caused serious crop failure and famines in 1816 across Europe and North America. However, few reports are available on Tambora’s influence in China despite the region’s susceptibility to monsoonal volcanic perturbation. This study presents a systemic analysis of the climatic and related social responses to the Tambora perturbation in China, by using two independent lines of proxy records and projecting the responses on top of the impacts averaged over all tropical eruptions of the past millennium. Both the tree ring and Chinese documentary proxies show that Tambora induced a cold excursion, which caused severe frost damage, snow and ice accumulations that are uncommonly seen in southern China. Cold temperature tends to cause drought by suppressing evaporation and monsoonal circulation—a hydroclimate response that is evident in the tree-ring-based Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas but largely missing in a multiproxy precipitation reconstruction. Historical records of drought, flood, frost, and famine also show fairly mild responses outside southern China, which may be partially due to the insensitivity of documentary records to the Tambora-induced perturbation, or the cold background climate set up by the low solar insolation of the coincident Dalton Minimum and a preceding unknown eruption in 1809. The results presented here provide new insights into the spatial extent and characteristics of the Tambora perturbation, by providing a systematic evaluation of the climatic aftermath in China in parallel to that in Europe and North America. They also argue for the integral use of multiple proxies from different regions of the world to gain a better understanding of the climatic impacts for individual volcanic eruptions.