Assessing extreme droughts in Spain during 1750–1850 from rogation ceremonies

Among the different meteorological hazards, droughts are those with the highest socio-economical impact on the Iberian Peninsula. Drought events have been largely studied in the instrumental period, but very little is known about the characteristics of droughts in the preinstrumental period. In this...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Domínguez-Castro, Fernando, Ribera, Pedro, García Herrera, Ricardo, Vaquero, José Manuel, Barriendos, Mariano, Cuadrat, J. M., Moreno, J. M.
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2012
País:España
Recursos:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:digitalcsic_::47b60a6989f778042527f7d2714abb22
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/64126
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Minimum ad 1675-1715
Iberian Peninsula
Climate change
Atmospheric circulation
Yucatan Peninsula
Maya civilization
Temporal patterns
Southern Spain
Late Holocene
Times scales
Descrição
Resumo:Among the different meteorological hazards, droughts are those with the highest socio-economical impact on the Iberian Peninsula. Drought events have been largely studied in the instrumental period, but very little is known about the characteristics of droughts in the preinstrumental period. In this work, several series of rogation ceremonies are used to identify severe droughts within the period 1750–1850. The overlapping of the rogation series with some instrumental series served to identify some climatic characteristics of rogation ceremonies: (a) during spring, rainfall deficits needed to celebrate rogation ceremonies are smaller than in any other season; (b) the hydrological deficit in a particular region increases with the number of locations celebrating rogations simultaneously. On the other hand, it was found that between 1750–1754 and 1779–1783 are probably the driest periods of the 101 analyzed years. Both show an important number of rogations all over Iberia and during all the seasons. The most extended drought of this period occurred during the spring of 1817, affecting 15 of the 16 locations studied. This drought was influenced by the Tambora eruption (1815). The study of the climate footprint of this eruption and its comparison with similar situations in the series suggest that the spring drought of 1824 may be associated with the eruptions of the Galunggung and Usu volcanoes (1822). Further studies are required to confirm this fact and understand the atmospheric mechanisms involved.