Periodic 18.6-year and cyclic 11-year induced drought and flood in northeastern China and some global implications

Abstract

The general patterns of climatic evolution in China during the Holocene are reviewed, and following the postglacial eustatic rise of sea-level and the institution of the East Asian Monsoon, the systems and principal fluctuations are found to be concordant with those operating elsewhere in the globe. China's unique wealth of written history provides an abundance of proxy data on the climatic record and that record now furnishes a basis for analysing both long-term and short-term fluctuations, as well as sunspot behavior, that together provide an insight into extraterrestrial forcing. Recent Chinese work suggests a solar forcing, but our own studies suggest rather that a lunar tidal component, reinforced at times by the solar element may prove more important. Analysis of a drought-flood index for Peking (Beijing) in northeastern China since A.D. 1470 supports evidence (Hameed et al., 1983) for both periodic lunar nodal 18.6-year and solar cyclic 11-year induced drought-flood in the region. The nodal term exhibits bistable phasing with respect to epochs of tidal maxima (for our century epochs occurred at 1917.5, 1936.1, 1954.7 and 1973.3), a phenomenon previously found in drought-flood proxy data for South America (Currie, 1983), India (Currie, 1984a), North America (Currie, 1984d), and Africa (Hameed and Currie, 1985; Currie and Hameed, 1985). Solar cycle epochs of drought-flood are tabulated for the past two centuries, and compared with those from North America and Africa.