Abstract
Abstract. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 was one of the most powerful of its kind in recorded history. This contribution addresses climatic responses to it, the post-eruption weather, and its impacts on human life in the Czech Lands. The climatic effects are evaluated in terms of air temperature and precipitation on the basis of long-term homogenised series from the Prague-Klementinum and Brno meteorological stations, and mean Czech series in the short term (1810–1820) and long term (1800–2010). This analysis is complemented by other climatic and environmental data derived from rich documentary evidence. Czech documentary sources make no direct mention of the Tambora eruption, neither do they relate any particular weather phenomena to it, but they record an extremely wet summer for 1815 and an extremely cold summer for 1816 (the "Year Without a Summer") that contributed to bad grain harvests and widespread grain price increases in 1817. Possible reasons for the cold summers in the first decade of the 19th century reflected in the contemporary press included comets, sunspot activity, long-term cooling and finally – as late as 1817 – earthquakes with volcanic eruptions.
Highlights
This reveals that spatial averaging of data and moving the territorial area of interest south-west of Prague may strengthen the summer signal of volcanic eruptions, including large tropical eruptions
The analyses and documentation cited in this paper demonstrate relatively weaker effects at regional or local scales for central Europe (e.g. Briffa and Jones, 1992; Písek and Brázdil, 2006)
This has been confirmed by Mikšovský et al (2014), who revealed the prominent and statistically significant imprint of major volcanic events on the global temperature signal while changes in mean Czech temperature series remained negligible (1866–2010 period)
Summary
Violent tropical volcanic eruptions, transporting large quantities of particles into the lower stratosphere, give rise to decreases in temperatures in the troposphere, which cools for 2 or 3 subsequent years in response to strongly enhanced back-scattering of incoming solar radiation (Robock and Mao, 1995; Briffa et al, 1998; Robock, 2000; Jones et al, 2004; Písek and Brázdil, 2006; Timmreck, 2012; Lacis, 2015; LeGrande and Anchukaitis, 2015). Camuffo and Enzi (1995) studied the occurrence of clouds of volcanic aerosols in Italy over the past 7 centuries with particular attention to the accompanying effect of “dry fog”. Fischer et al (2007) analysed winter and summer temperature signals in Europe following 15 major tropical volcanic eruptions and found significant summer cooling on a continental scale and somewhat drier conditions over central Europe. The effects of large tropical volcanic eruptions on radiative balance manifest themselves in widespread cooling, and contribute to largescale changes in atmospheric circulation, leading to one or two post-volcanic mild winters in the Northern Hemisphere (Robock, 2000). Wegmann et al (2014) analysed 14 tropical eruptions and found an increase of summer precipitation in southcentral Europe and a reduction of the Asian and African summer monsoons in first post-eruption years. Weaker monsoon circulations attenuate the northern element of the Hadley cell and influence atmospheric circulation over the AtlanticEuropean sector, contributing to higher precipitation totals
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