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Old World megadroughts and pluvials during the Common Era

2015; American Association for the Advancement of Science; Volume: 1; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1126/sciadv.1500561

2375-2548

Edward R. Cook, Richard Seager, Yochanan Kushnir, Keith R. Briffa, Ulf Büntgen, David Frank, Paul J. Krusic, Willy Tegel, Gerard van der Schrier, Laia Andreu‐Hayles, Mike Baillie, Claudia Baittinger, Niels Bleicher, Niels Bonde, David Brown, Marco Carrer, Richard J. Cooper, Katarina Čufar, Christoph Dittmar, Jan Esper, Carol B. Griggs, Björn E. Gunnarson, Björn Günther, Emília Gutiérrez, Kristof Haneca, Samuli Helama, Franz Herzig, Karl‐Uwe Heußner, Jutta Hofmann, Pavel Janda, Raymond Kontic, Nesıbe Köse, Tomáš Kyncl, Tom Levanič, Hans W. Linderholm, Sturt W. Manning, Thomas Melvin, Daniel Miles, Burkhard Neuwirth, Kurt Nicolussi, Paola Nola, Momchil Panayotov, Ionel Popa, Andreas Rothe, Kristina Seftigen, Andrea Seim, Helene Svarva, Miroslav Svoboda, Terje Thun, Mauri Timonen, Ramzi Touchan, Volodymyr Trotsiuk, Valérie Trouet, Felix Walder, Tomasz Ważny, Rob Wilson, Christian Zang,

Hydrology and Drought Analysis

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.