Documentary data and the study of past droughts: a global state of the art

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.

European warm-season temperature and hydroclimate since 850 CE

“…These uncertainties are at present challenging to address as no other proxy archive provides such highly resolved temporal and spatial reconstructions needed for robust cross-proxy validation over the full past millennium (SOM). Historical documentary data is one potentially promising source of independent validation of the temperature-hydroclimate relationship obtained from tree-ring based reconstructions (Brázdil et al 2018). However, the possibility to use documentary data for this purpose is limited by the current distribution, in both space and time, of regionally 'paired' temperature and hydroclimate records, their season of recording, and often by their inability to capture low-frequency variability and trend (Pfister 2018.…”

“Everything is scorched by the burning sun”: missionary perspectives and experiences of 19th- and early 20th-century droughts in semi-arid central Namibia

“…Our paper makes an important contribution to the study of historical droughts, both globally and more specifically to southern Africa (see Brázdil et al, 2018), by demonstrating the imperative to evaluate historical drought events, not only according to meteorological parameters but also in consideration of changing natural-environmental and humanenvironmental contexts through time. For this, written documentary sources are an essential and invaluable proxy record that ought to be more regularly considered when evaluating the severity of past droughts.…”

“…Agnew and Chappell, 1999;Mishra and Singh, 2010;Lloyd-Hughes, 2014;Parry et al, 2016). Brázdil et al (2019) explore various types and characteristics of drought that are relevant to both contemporary and historical contexts. These authors use the definition by Wilhite and Pulwarty (2018), i.e.…”

Droughts in the area of Poland in recent centuries in the light of multi-proxy data

“…Therefore, in recent decades quite a lot of drought reconstructions encompassing almost the entire millennium, or the shorter historical pre-industrial period, were constructed for different greater or smaller regions (e.g. Inglot, 1968;Piervitali and Colacino, 2001;Cook et al, 2004Cook et al, , 2010Cook et al, , 2015Herweijer et al, 2007;Pfister et al, 2006;Brewer et al, 2007;Domínguez-Castro et al, 2008Woodhouse et al, 2010;Brázdil et al, 2013Brázdil et al, , 2016Brázdil et al, , 2018 (see references herein); Dobrovolný et al, 2015;Fragoso et al, 2018;Hanel et al, 2018).…”