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. 2015 Nov 6;1(10):e1500561.
doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1500561. eCollection 2015 Nov.

Old World megadroughts and pluvials during the Common Era

Edward R Cook  1 , Richard Seager  1 , Yochanan Kushnir  1 , Keith R Briffa  2 , Ulf Büntgen  3 , David Frank  3 , Paul J Krusic  4 , Willy Tegel  5 , Gerard van der Schrier  6 , Laia Andreu-Hayles  1 , Mike Baillie  7 , Claudia Baittinger  8 , Niels Bleicher  9 , Niels Bonde  8 , David Brown  7 , Marco Carrer  10 , Richard Cooper  2 , Katarina Čufar  11 , Christoph Dittmar  12 , Jan Esper  13 , Carol Griggs  14 , Björn Gunnarson  15 , Björn Günther  16 , Emilia Gutierrez  17 , Kristof Haneca  18 , Samuli Helama  19 , Franz Herzig  20 , Karl-Uwe Heussner  21 , Jutta Hofmann  22 , Pavel Janda  23 , Raymond Kontic  24 , Nesibe Köse  25 , Tomáš Kyncl  26 , Tom Levanič  27 , Hans Linderholm  28 , Sturt Manning  14 , Thomas M Melvin  2 , Daniel Miles  29 , Burkhard Neuwirth  30 , Kurt Nicolussi  31 , Paola Nola  32 , Momchil Panayotov  33 , Ionel Popa  34 , Andreas Rothe  35 , Kristina Seftigen  28 , Andrea Seim  28 , Helene Svarva  36 , Miroslav Svoboda  23 , Terje Thun  36 , Mauri Timonen  19 , Ramzi Touchan  37 , Volodymyr Trotsiuk  23 , Valerie Trouet  37 , Felix Walder  9 , Tomasz Ważny  38 , Rob Wilson  39 , Christian Zang  40
Affiliations

Old World megadroughts and pluvials during the Common Era

Edward R Cook et al. Sci Adv. .

Abstract

Climate model projections suggest widespread drying in the Mediterranean Basin and wetting in Fennoscandia in the coming decades largely as a consequence of greenhouse gas forcing of climate. To place these and other "Old World" climate projections into historical perspective based on more complete estimates of natural hydroclimatic variability, we have developed the "Old World Drought Atlas" (OWDA), a set of year-to-year maps of tree-ring reconstructed summer wetness and dryness over Europe and the Mediterranean Basin during the Common Era. The OWDA matches historical accounts of severe drought and wetness with a spatial completeness not previously available. In addition, megadroughts reconstructed over north-central Europe in the 11th and mid-15th centuries reinforce other evidence from North America and Asia that droughts were more severe, extensive, and prolonged over Northern Hemisphere land areas before the 20th century, with an inadequate understanding of their causes. The OWDA provides new data to determine the causes of Old World drought and wetness and attribute past climate variability to forced and/or internal variability.

Keywords: Mediterranean drying; climate change; dendroclimatology; drought atlas; greenhouse gas forcing; megadrought; tree-ring reconstruction.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. Map of the JJA scPDSI target field (small black grid points) and the 106 chronology tree-ring network used for reconstruction.
There are 5414 half-degree scPDSI grid points. The OWDA tree-ring network (filled triangles shaded by start year) illustrates the reasonably uniform coverage of chronologies across the domain, except for Russia.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2. OWDA maps of known years of hydroclimatic extremes.
(A to F) The maps are presented in reverse chronological order based on documentary climate records: from the best years recorded by instrumental climate records [1921 (A) and 1893 (B)] to the lesser known years [1741 (C), 1616 (D), 1540 (E), and 1315 (F)]. See the text for details and refer to Supplementary Materials for more examples of historical droughts from documentary records.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3. Comparison of mean scPDSI fields in the OWDA during periods associated with the MCA, LIA, and modern period (MOD).
(A) The mean fields were calculated over the time intervals indicated, and the areas in those fields with significant mean anomalies of wetness or dryness (p < 0.01, two-tailed, corrected for lag − 1 autocorrelation) are indicated in the middle set of maps. The area of maximum dryness during the MCA period is indicated by the yellow rectangle in the lower MCA map. (B) Average of OWDA reconstructions from within this rectangle. It confirms the drier conditions during the MCA period and also shows the occurrence of an extraordinary megadrought in the mid-15th century. CL, confidence level.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4. The NHDA based on the OWDA, NADA, and MADA.
(A) The temperate latitude regions of drought atlases within the dashed boxes are emphasized for purposes of comparison because not all drought atlases have boreal (for example, MADA) or tropical (for example, OWDA) reconstructions. (B) The original annually resolved drought reconstructions in each region were averaged from 1000 to 1989 CE, transformed into standard normal deviates (Z scores), and low pass–filtered to emphasize variability that was >30 years in duration. The low pass–filtered average series were renormalized to eliminate any differential weighting by region and averaged to produce the NHDA records (not renormalized) shown in black.
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