Old World Megadroughts and Pluvials During the Common Era

Edward R. Cook and Richard Seager and Yochanan Kushnir and Keith R. Briffa and Ulf Büntgen and David Frank and Paul J. Krusic and Willy Tegel and Gerard van der Schrier and Laia Andreu-Hayles and Mike Baillie and Claudia Baittinger and Niels Bonde and David Bown and Marco Carrer and Richard Cooper and Katarina Čufar and Christoph Dittmar and Jan Esper and Carol Griggs and Björn Gunnarson and Björn Günther and Emilia Gutierrez and Kristof Haneca and Samuli Helama and Franz Herzig and Karl-Uwe Heussner and Jutta Hofmann and Pavel Janda and Raymond Kontic and Nesibe Köse and Tomáš Kyncl and Tom Levanič and Hans Linderholm and Sturt Manning and Thomas M. Melvin and Daniel Miles and Burkhard Neuwirth and Kurt Nicolussi and Paola Nola and Momchil Panayotov and Ionel Popa and Andreas Rothe and Kristina Seftigen and Andrea Seim and Helene Svarva and Miroslav Svoboda and Terje Thun and Mauri Timonen and Ramzi Touchan and Volodymyr Trotsiuk and Valerie Trouet and Felix Walder and Tomasz Ważny and Rob Wilson and Christian Zang (2015) Old World Megadroughts and Pluvials During the Common Era. Science Advances, 1 (10). pp. 1-9. ISSN Y508-4563

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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.

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