Abstract
Abstract. The use of documentary evidence to investigate past climatic trends and events has become a recognised approach in recent decades. This contribution presents the state of the art in its application to droughts. The range of documentary evidence is very wide, including general annals, chronicles, memoirs and diaries kept by missionaries, travellers and those specifically interested in the weather; records kept by administrators tasked with keeping accounts and other financial and economic records; legal-administrative evidence; religious sources; letters; songs; newspapers and journals; pictographic evidence; chronograms; epigraphic evidence; early instrumental observations; society commentaries; and compilations and books. These are available from many parts of the world. This variety of documentary information is evaluated with respect to the reconstruction of hydroclimatic conditions (precipitation, drought frequency and drought indices). Documentary-based drought reconstructions are then addressed in terms of long-term spatio-temporal fluctuations, major drought events, relationships with external forcing and large-scale climate drivers, socio-economic impacts and human responses. Documentary-based drought series are also considered from the viewpoint of spatio-temporal variability for certain continents, and their employment together with hydroclimate reconstructions from other proxies (in particular tree rings) is discussed. Finally, conclusions are drawn, and challenges for the future use of documentary evidence in the study of droughts are presented.
Highlights
The term “drought” encompasses a complex phenomenon; it is used to express a prolonged period of negative deviation in water balance compared to the climatological norm in a given area (Wilhite and Pulwarty, 2018)
The aim of this article is to present the state of the art for spatio-temporal analyses of droughts derived from documentary evidence for a special issue of Climate of the Past entitled “Droughts over the centuries: what can documentary evidence tell us about drought variability, severity and human responses.”
In the British Isles, Ogilvie and Farmer (1997) used “precipitation scores” to classify the character of monthly precipitation for England in CE 1200–1439 based on available documentary evidence
Summary
The term “drought” encompasses a complex phenomenon; it is used to express a prolonged period of negative deviation in water balance compared to the climatological norm in a given area (Wilhite and Pulwarty, 2018). Recurrent feature of climate that occurs in virtually all climate zones (Svoboda and Fuchs, 2018). One of the related environmental phenomena associated with more frequent and severe drought can be desertification, which has an impact on the environment but may have severe consequences for human society (e.g. Trnka et al, 2018). A better understanding of the processes leading up to droughts, including their predictability, is highly relevant to social well-being and individual quality of life. Heim (2002) divided droughts into four categories: (a) meteorological, (b) agricultural, (c) hydrological and (d) socioeconomic. Meteorological drought is caused by a direct significant reduction of precipitation totals at the scale of weeks or months compared to mean precipitation patterns in a given
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