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American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science Advances, 10(1), 2015

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500561

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Old World megadroughts and pluvials during the Common Era

Journal article published in 2015 by Edward R. Cook, Richard Seager, Yochanan Kushnir ORCID, Keith R. Briffa ORCID, U. Bu ntgen, Ulf Büntgen, David Frank, Paul J. Krusic ORCID, Willy Tegel, Gerard van der Schrier, Laia Andreu-Hayles ORCID, Mike Baillie, Claudia Baittinger ORCID, Niels Bleicher ORCID, Niels Bonde and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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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.