Search

According to the written records and scores of grain harvest in the official historical documents of the Qing Dynasty in China, the spatial-temporal distribution and the impact caused by the 1759 AD drought in Northwest China were reconstructed, and the response of Chinese society to the drought at that time was summarized. In the spring and summer of 1759, vast areas of northern China suffered from drought, of which that experienced in the northwest region was the most serious. Starting from 27 April 1759, droughts covered Zhili, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces, and the droughts in Gansu and northern Shaanxi provinces lasted until 23 July 1759. This severe drought caused the worst crop failure in Northwest China during the period 1730–1900. By implementing a series of disaster relief measures, the Qing government managed to ease the adverse societal impact of the drought in the summer of 1760. Among the relief measures, tax reduction and exemption in disaster-stricken areas, grain storage in the northwest region, and bumper agricultural harvests in Henan, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Anhui provinces in 1759 were the main reasons for the rapid recovery from the drought impacts. With better climatic conditions in the 18th century, China had higher agricultural harvest levels in the 18th century than in the 19th century. Favorable financial conditions increased drought relief efforts, which was the background for the greater societal adaptability to the climate disaster of 1759. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proxy-based precipitation reconstruction is essential to study the inter-annual to decadal variability and underlying mechanisms beyond the instrumental period that is critically needed for climate modeling, prediction and attribution. Based on 2912 annually resolved proxy series mainly derived from tree rings and historical documents, we present a set of standard precipitation index (SPI) reconstructions for each year (November–October), covering the whole of Asia, and for the wet season (i.e., November–April for western Asia and May–October for the others) since 1700, with the spatial resolution of 2.5 ∘. To screen the optimal candidate proxies for SPI reconstruction in each grid from available proxies in its connected region with a homogeneous rainfall regime and similar precipitation variability, a new approach is developed by adopting the grid-location-dependent division derived from the instrumental SPI data. The validation shows that these reconstructions are effective for most of Asia. The assessment of data quality compared with gauge precipitation before calibration time indicates that our reconstruction has high quality to show the precipitation variability in most of the study areas, except for a few grids in western Russia, the coastal area of southeast Asia and northern Japan. The full dataset can be obtained from https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.01829 (Y. Liu et al., 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major droughts and floods in the Hanjiang River Basin, central China, have a significant impact on flood prevention and control in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and water resources management in the areas of the South–North Water Diversion Middle Line Project. However, there is a lack of understanding of the multi-decadal to centennial-scale patterns of extreme droughts and floods in the area. Applying the yearly drought and flood records from historical documents and precipitation data in the period of instrumental measurements, this study constructs a time series of extreme droughts and floods in the Hanjiang River Basin from 1426–2017 and analyzes the temporal and spatial characteristics of the extreme drought and flood event variations. The results show that there were a total of 45 extreme droughts and 52 extreme floods in the basin over the past 592 years. Extreme droughts and floods were highly variable on a multi-decadal to centennial scale, and the frequencies were higher in the first and last 100 years or so of the study period and lower in between. Spatially, the frequencies of extreme droughts and floods were generally higher in the middle and lower reaches than in the upper reaches. It was also found that there is a good correlation of drought and flood frequencies between the upper Hanjiang River Basin and North China. These results are informative for the study of mechanisms and predictability of multi-decadal to centennial-scale variability of extreme hydroclimatic events in the river basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]