Abstract
Abstract. This study presents a new epistemological analysis of drought chronology through a well-defined methodology for reconstructing past drought series, as well as series of other associated ecological and societal impact variables. Instead of building a grading system based on mixed criteria, this method facilitates transparency in the reconstruction process and enables the statistical examination of all variables when building series. The data for the present study are derived mainly from the REACHES (Reconstructed East Asian Climate Historical Encoded Series) database; however, other archival documentary and index data from independent sources are also applied to understand drought narratives and to cross-check and validate the analysis derived from REACHES. From the time series analysis, six severe drought periods are identified in the Qing dynasty, and then a spatial analysis is performed to demonstrate the spatial distribution of drought and other variables in the six periods, as well as a social network analysis to reveal connections between drought and other ecological and societal variables. Research results clearly illustrate the role of human intervention in influencing the impacts of drought and their societal consequences. Particularly, the correlation between drought and socioeconomic turmoil is not strong; crop failure and famine are important intermediate factors, while ecological factors such as locust and disaster relief measures are all imperative to intervene between crop production and famine. Implications of the study on drought impact are provided, as well as the significance of drought on historical climate reconstruction studies.
Highlights
Global warming is expected to influence the earth’s hydrological cycle and put greater stress on water resources
We further divided the drought records into two groups: one group that consists of pure drought vocabularies is interpreted as meteorological drought and the other that consists of dried water bodies is interpreted as hydrological drought
We found that a higher number of hydrological drought records often occurred in the years having more meteorological drought records
Summary
Global warming is expected to influence the earth’s hydrological cycle and put greater stress on water resources. There are some recent observations that hint at the agreement with the projected enlarging wet–dry contrast pattern and intensified drought (Schewe et al, 2014), substantial uncertainties about specific patterns and trends remain. More high-quality hydroclimate data are necessary if we wish to remove these uncertainties. Such data are necessary for assessing the performance of climate models, especially on their capability in projecting reliably the climates of the few decades. The length of the instrumental meteorological data series is only a little more than a hundred years, which is not long enough to assess the validity of climate models that make predictions for many decades into the future (Cook et al, 2014; Ljungqvist et al, 2016)
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