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Locations and rivers in the Czech Republic mentioned in this paper: 1-Benešov nad Ploučnicí, 2-Břeclav, 3-Bzenec, 4-Cheb, 5-ˇ Ceská Lípa, 6-ˇ Ceská Skalice, 7-ˇ Ceské Budějovice, 8-Dačice, 9-Děčín-Podmokly, 10-Dobruška, 11-Domažlice, 12-Hradec Králové, 13-Hradisko / Klášterní Hradisko, 14-Hranice, 15-Jáchymov, 16-Jihlava, 17-Kadaň, 18-Karlštejn, 19-Klatovy, 20Kroměříž, 21-Krupka, 22-Litoměřice, 23-Louny, 24-Mimoň, 25-Moravsk´yMoravsk´y Beroun, 26-Olomouc, 27-Opočno, 28-Plzeň, 29Praskolesy, 30-Přerov, 31-Přímětice, 32-Roudnice nad Labem, 33-R´ymařovR´ymařov, 34-Slan´ySlan´y, 35-Sobůlky, 36-Stará Voda, 37-Svat´ySvat´y Kopeček, 38-Svitávka, 39-Trutnov, 40-Třebíč, 41-Třeboň, 42-Uherské Hradiště, 43-Uhersk´yUhersk´y Brod, 44-Varnsdorf, 45-Zašová, 46-Zbraslav, 47-ˇ Zelechovice.
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This paper addresses droughts in the Czech Lands in the 1090–2012 AD period, basing its findings on documentary evidence and instrumental records. Various documentary sources were employed for the selection of drought events, which were then interpreted at a monthly level. While the data on droughts before 1500 AD are scarce, the analysis concentra...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... evidence used as basic data in his- torical climatology (Pfister, 2001;Brázdil et al., 2005Brázdil et al., , 2010de Kraker, 2006;Kiss, 2009;Mauelshagen, 2010) and histor- ical hydrology (Brázdil et al., 2006a(Brázdil et al., , 2012c). Data sources that report droughts in the Czech Lands (for all Czech lo- cations mentioned in this paper see Fig. 1) are mentioned ...
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... terms of occurrence of the most extreme decades. While the documentary data indicated that the driest decade was 1531-1540, TRW-based Z-index led to the years 1601- 1610. Certain common features were found when frequency of dry months (MAMJJ) was compared with mean recon- structed precipitation totals over the same season for individ- ual decades (Fig. 10). The two data sets were transformed to z-scores for better comparison. In this case, the correla- tion between the two characteristics of dryness is significant (r = −0.39) and evaluation of dryness from two different sources agrees at least partly for most of the decades. Among the most extremely dry decades to appear are those of ...
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... with a number of natural proxies) were used in a gridded (0.5 × 0.5 deg.) mul- tiproxy precipitation reconstruction for Europe by Pauling et al. (2006). A subset of this reconstruction covering central Europe (48 • N/12 • E-52 • N/18 • E) was compared with the Czech drought chronology in the common 1501-2000 pe- riod at a decadal resolution (Fig. 11). A relatively high and statistically significant correlation was found for JJA values (r = −0.58), implying that the two series share a common variance of about 34 ...
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... very high inter-decadal variability in both series, numerous common features can be found not only for indi- vidual decades but also for long-term tendencies (Fig. 11). Less frequent droughts were especially typical of the second half of the 16th century and for the 17th century. Conversely, more frequent droughts occurred in the first part of the 16th century, the end of the 18th century and both series also in- dicate more droughts during the 20th century. The subset of European precipitation ...
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In this paper, series of drought occurrence and drought extension in the Iberian Peninsula are constructed for the 1600–1750 period from seven rogation series. These rogation ceremony records come from Bilbao, Catalonia, Zamora, Zaragoza, Toledo, Murcia and Seville. They are distributed across the Peninsula and include the areas with the most chara...
Citations
... In order to further test the feasibility of our VPD reconstruction, in the final step of the analysis we compare the regional averages and running averages (30 years) of the reconstructed VPD with temperature (Luterbacher et al., 2004), precipitation (Pauling et al., 2006), and Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reconstructions for the three European regions, as defined by IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) (IPCC, 2021a; Iturbide et al., 2020): northern Europe, central Europe, and the Mediterranean. Furthermore, we show maps of the European summer VPD for the most extreme positive years (1868, 1707, 1835) and most extreme negative years (1785,1742,1747) to investigate the spatial variability in concordance with past historical data (Brázdil et al., 2013;Brooks and Glasspoole, 1922;Glaser, 2008;Ionita et al., 2021;Marusek, 2010;Pauling et al., 2006;Trigo et al., 2009). Prior to this mapping, all VPD grid cells are centered and standardized (z transformation) to present z anomalies for each grid cell. ...
The response of evapotranspiration to anthropogenic warming is of critical importance for the water and carbon cycle. Contradictory conclusions about evapotranspiration changes are caused primarily by their brevity in time and sparsity in space, as well as the strong influence of internal variability. Here, we present the first gridded reconstruction of the summer (June, July, and August) vapor pressure deficit (VPD) for the past 4 centuries at the European level. This gridded reconstruction is based on 26 European tree ring oxygen isotope records and is obtained using a random forest approach. According to validation scores obtained with the Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiency, our reconstruction is robust over large parts of Europe since 1600, in particular for the westernmost and northernmost regions, where most tree ring records are located. Based on our reconstruction, we show that from the mid-1700s a trend towards higher summer VPD occurred in central Europe and the Mediterranean region that is related to a simultaneous increase in temperature and decrease in precipitation. This increasing summer VPD trend continues throughout the observational period and in recent times. Moreover, our summer VPD reconstruction helps to visualize the local and regional impacts of the current climate change, as well as to minimize statistical uncertainties of historical VPD variability. This paper provides also new insights into the relationship between summer VPD and large-scale atmospheric circulation, and we show that summer VPD has two preferred modes of variability, namely a NW–SE dipole-like mode and a N–S dipole-like mode. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary use of the data should be emphasized, as summer VPD is a crucial parameter for many climatological feedback processes in the Earth's surface system. The reconstructed summer VPD gridded data over the last 400 years are available at the following link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5958836 (Balting et al., 2022).
... In order to test the feasibility of our VPD reconstruction, in the final step of the analysis we compare the regional averages and running averages (30 years) of the reconstructed VPD with temperature (Luterbacher et al., 2004), precipitation (Pauling et , 2006) and Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reconstructions (Cook et al., 2015) for the three European regions, as 175 defined by IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) (IPCC, 2021a;Iturbide et al., 2020): Northern Europe, Central Europe, and the Mediterranean region. Furthermore, we show maps of the European summer VPD for selected years with extreme positive VPD anomalies (1868,1707,1835) and extreme negative VPD anomalies (1785,1742,1747) to investigate the spatial variability in concordance with past historical data (Brázdil et al., 2013;Brooks and Glasspoole, 1922;Cook et al., 2015;Glaser, 2008;Ionita et al., 2021;Marusek, 2010;Pauling et al., 2006;Trigo et al., 2009). Prior to this mapping, all VPD grid 180 cells are centered and standardized (z-transformation) to present z-anomalies for each grid cell. ...
The response of evapotranspiration to anthropogenic warming is of critical importance for the water and carbon cycle. Contradictory conclusions about evapotranspiration changes are caused primarily by their brevity in time and sparsity in space, as well as the strong influence of internal variability. Here, we present the first gridded reconstruction of the summer vapour pressure deficit (VPD) for the past four centuries at the European level. This gridded reconstruction is based on 26 European tree-ring oxygen isotope records and is obtained using a Random Forest approach. Based on our reconstruction, we show that from the mid- 1700s, a trend towards higher VPD occurred in Central Europe and the Mediterranean region which is related to a simultaneous increase in temperature and decrease in precipitation. This increasing VPD trend continues throughout the observational period and in recent times. Moreover, our VPD reconstruction helps to visualize the local and regional impacts of the current climate change as well as to minimize statistical uncertainties of historical VPD variability. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary use of the data should be emphasized, as VPD is a crucial parameter for many climatological feedback processes in the earth surface system. The reconstructed VPD gridded data, over the last 400 years, is available at the following link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5958836 (Balting, D. F. et al., 2022).
... In the 16th century, the years 1536, 1540 and 1590 are associated with significant runoff deficits. The event of 1540 has already been reported (Brázdil et al., 2013;Cook et al., 2015;Brázdil et al., 2019) as the worst event of the 16th century and more severe in terms of changing hydrologic conditions. In 1540, almost 90 % of the Rhine and Elbe River catchments (Basel and Cologne) experienced low yearly discharge, which ranked as the greatest low flows in the last 5 centuries (Leggewie and Mauelshagen, 2018). ...
... In the Köln-Rhine catchment, 26 remarkable droughts have been captured over the past 500 years, and the year 1686 reached the largest runoff deficit (156 mm yr −1 ). The 1616 is considered the driest year of the 17th century, the so-called "drought of the century" (Brázdil et al., 2013), which significantly impacted the major rivers in Europe (e.g. Rhine, Main and Wesser). ...
... Brázdil et al. (2018) identified three unusual drought periods (1540, 1616 and 1718-19) over the Czech lands, highlighting the 1616 drought, which caused widespread famine, dried up the Elbe river watershed and altered the climate of neighbouring nations (Switzerland and Germany). The hunger stone of the Elbe River also revealed the exceptionally dry year of 1616 (Brázdil et al., 2013). During the 18th century, a similar level of runoff deficit was simulated in the years 1706 and 1719. ...
Since the beginning of this century, Europe has been experiencing severe drought events (2003, 2007, 2010, 2018 and 2019) which have had adverse
impacts on various sectors, such as agriculture, forestry, water management, health and ecosystems. During the last few decades, projections of the
impact of climate change on hydroclimatic extremes have often been used for quantification of changes in the characteristics of these extremes. Recently,
the research interest has been extended to include reconstructions of hydroclimatic conditions to provide historical context for present and future
extremes. While there are available reconstructions of temperature, precipitation, drought indicators, or the 20th century runoff for Europe,
multi-century annual runoff reconstructions are still lacking. In this study, we have used reconstructed precipitation and temperature data, Palmer
Drought Severity Index and available observed runoff across 14 European catchments in order to develop annual runoff reconstructions for the
period 1500–2000 using two data-driven and one conceptual lumped hydrological model. The comparison to observed runoff data has shown a good match
between the reconstructed and observed runoff and their characteristics, particularly deficit volumes. On the other hand, the validation of input
precipitation fields revealed an underestimation of the variance across most of Europe, which is propagated into the reconstructed runoff
series. The reconstructed runoff is available via Figshare, an open-source scientific data repository, under the DOI
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15178107, (Sadaf et al., 2021).
... Drought, which is defined as a negative deviation of the water balance from the climatological normal in a given area, is one of the most frequent and hazardous disasters worldwide [1]. Droughts commonly affect large areas and last a long time, resulting in adverse effects on agricultural systems and causing considerable economic losses to agricultural production [2,3]. ...
... There is no doubt that the drought characteristics in a given region can be assessed using long-term data. This type of analysis provides an understanding of long-term climate change, the interaction between several factors, as well as the climatic environment in historical periods [1]. The analysis of long time series is also important in historical research. ...
... Gou [18] reconstructed the drought history of the western Qilian mountains using an 850-year tree-ring-based reconstruction. Brázdil [1] analyzed droughts in the Czech Lands in the AD 1090-2012 period based on documents and instrumental records. Li [13] reconstructed a 516-year streamflow in the source region of the Yangtze River and detected drought events during the AD 1485-2000 period. ...
Drought is one of the most frequent and most widespread natural disasters worldwide, significantly impacting agricultural production and the ecological environment. An investigation of long-term drought changes and its influencing factors provides not only an understanding of historical droughts but also a scientific basis for the protection of future water resources. This study investigated the temporal characteristics of drought in a study site located in the center of Southwest China (SWC) over a 700-year period (AD 1300–2005) using the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). The linkage between drought and its influencing factors is discussed. An algorithm based on the random forest (RF) method was proposed to analyze the dynamic influence of the factors on drought. We also examined the linkages between the demise of two dynasties and historical drought events. The results showed that the study site was a drought-prone area in the study period and experienced a non-significant drying trend in all centuries, except for the 17th century; a total of 232 droughts were detected in the study site from AD 1300–2005. The wavelet spectrum of the PDSI series showed the existence of 4-, 8-, 16-, 32-, and 128-year-periods. A strong correlation existed between the sunspot numbers and the PDSI. The correlation of the period between the PDSI and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) series in the same frequency domain was weak, while the ENSO exhibited a strong interaction with the PDSI in some time periods. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and PDSI had no resonance period in the low-frequency region, but there was a period of 80–130 years in the high-frequency region. The relative rates of influence of the ENSO, sunspot numbers, and PDO during AD 1700–1996 were 38.40%, 31.81%, and 29.8%, respectively. However, the mechanism of the interaction between droughts and the influential factors is complex, and the dominant factor changed over time. The analysis of long-term drought changes based on the PDSI series may provide clues to understand the development of historical events.
... This seasonal cycle is essential in the global hydrological cycle, being the driver of water supply in a large part of the world: seasonal snow and glacier melt comprises the main water resource for up to 22% of the global population (Immerzeel et al., 2020;Kaser, Großhauser, & Marzeion, 2010). In the past, inhabitants of glacier-dominated regions have been spared when drought was imminent through lack of precipitation (Pritchard, 2019), such as in the 1540 drought in Central Europe (Brázdil et al., 2013;Pfister, 1999). Beyond these indirect impacts, SMB change can affect and cause other hydroclimatic events, including extremes such as droughts and floods. ...
... When considering the past millennium and the occurrence of droughts in Europe, particular dry conditions were prevailing in the MCA with dry summer especially between 1010 and 1165 (B€ untgen et al., 2010;Cook et al., 2015), while the LIA between 1430 and 1720 was subject to overall drier conditions (e.g., 15th and 16th centuries) but less pronounced compared to the MCA (B€ untgen et al., 2010). Severe droughts occurred in 1540, 1590, 1616, and 1718 including 1719 (Brázdil et al., 2013). Even though their analyses focus on the Czech Republic, the authors of this study assume that this region is representative for surrounding areas in Central Europe, since they form a homogeneous region, which acknowledges the fact that droughts are large-scale events in terms of both spatial (up to continental scale) and temporal dimension (several months and beyond). ...
... Even though their analyses focus on the Czech Republic, the authors of this study assume that this region is representative for surrounding areas in Central Europe, since they form a homogeneous region, which acknowledges the fact that droughts are large-scale events in terms of both spatial (up to continental scale) and temporal dimension (several months and beyond). For numerous historic drought events, the exact timing cannot be reconstructed accurately in terms of the affected period within in the year from the available sources, even though exceptions exist (Brázdil et al., 2013). The 1540 drought, for instance, was especially severe in terms of its length, since it covered a dry period from March 1540 until October 1540. ...
The Indian subcontinent is home to 1.39 billion people, mainly dependent on the agrarian-based economy. The Indian summer monsoon rainfall from June to September plays a vital role in providing water for agricultural and other lively needs. This rainfall is highly varying in the spatiotemporal domain and thus, leads to localized and organized extreme events in the form of floods on micro to mesoscale. The extreme rainfall events aggravate developing countries like India since the country's 54.6% human resources are involved in agriculture and allied sectors. Thus, understanding the characteristics of extreme events throughout India is important for the country's overall development. This chapter explores the systematic evolution of the studies of the extreme rainfall events over the Indian subcontinent and the regional characteristics. The linear trends reported by various studies are also explored and found that the trends are nonuniform throughout the nation. The nature and frequency of occurrence of these events are showing regional features. Therefore, the focus is on the extreme events in Peninsular India, central India, northeast regions, and the Himalayan regions. The dynamics of extreme events in all these regions are different. In general, Himalayan areas are controlled by extratropical intrusion and low-pressure systems. However, in the northeast regions, the main dynamic reason is the westerly regimes of the southerly wind and synoptic systems from the nearby oceans. Central India is governed by varying mechanisms from oceanic warming to topographical features. However, Peninsular India received its extremes in two seasons. The Tamil Nadu region experiences it in the northeast monsoon season, and the windward side of the Western Ghats experiences it during the southwest monsoon period. Hence, both areas have different attributing mechanisms. Additionally, the chapter investigates the future projections of the extreme events.
... In the most recent two decades research in the field of historical climatology has made a significant advance in our knowledge of how societies functioned in the past, and how they dealt with climate variability throughout the centuries (Brázdil et al., 2013a(Brázdil et al., , b, 2018Camenisch et al., 2016Camenisch et al., , 2020Kiss, 2014Kiss, , 2017Kiss, , 2019Kiss and Nikolić, 2015;Kiss and Pribyl, 2019;Huhtamaa and Helama, 2017;Ljungqvist et al., 2021). However, much still remains to be done. ...
The period from around 1450 to 1550 in Europe is extremely interesting from the perspective of research on extreme weather events. It was a period of events that strongly influenced the societies and economies of the Old Continent. So far, the literature has been more focused on western and northern Europe. Concerning the region of central Europe, the greatest attention was paid to the Czech Republic or Hungary. This article revolves around the Polish lands, which experienced their greatest economic boom in the 16th century. We consider whether and how the droughts of the decade from 1531 to 1540 might have affected the country's economic development. We analyse a number of written sources which are the product of the treasury apparatus of the time (tax registers, data from water customs, tax exemptions, inventories of land estates etc.), but also information on fluctuations in product prices in the most important cities in this part of
Europe. The work not only provides a detailed account of economic data, but
also attempts to reflect on the relevance of linking information on fires in urban centres in the period characterized by weather extremes.
... The number of days with both meteorological and agricultural droughts is increasing. This trend can also be seen in the countries neighbouring Slovakia: in Poland (Przybylak et al., 2020;Oleksiak et al., 2021), Hungary (Alsafadi et al., 2020;Buzási et al., 2021), and Czech Republic (Brázdil et al., 2013;Bartošová et al., 2015). Therefore, it is necessary to make the area optimally functional (Pagáč Mokrá, et al., 2020) to effectively manage rainwater (Pokrývková et al., 2021), build sufficient irrigation systems, and focus on growing drought-resistant crops. ...
Aim of the study:
Droughts are one of the more costly natural hazards on a year-to-year basis. Their impacts are significant and widespread, affecting many economic sectors and people at any one time (WMO & GWP, 2016). In our paper we will focus on the comparison of meteorological drought (precipitation) and agricultural drought (available soil water) in the Nitra River basin, Slovakia.
Material and methods:
Data from the Nitra River Basin were provided from the meteorological stations (Svinná, Bystričany, Solčany, Veľké Ripňany, Jelenec and Pribeta ) of the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. The meteorological drought is defined as a period with no precipitation (Petrovič, 1960). Agricultural drought was determined as the value below the amount of water storage in the soil profile (0.20 m) accessible to plants.
Results and conclusions:
We focused on the comparison of meteorological drought and the number of days with both type of drought is from year 2014 increasing. The worst year was 2018 in every meteorological station, when the agricultural drought was with short interruptions from sprig to winter. This trend can also be seen in the countries neighbouring Slovakia - Poland, Hungary or Czech Republic.
... Finally, we compare the regional averages and running averages (30 years) of the reconstructed VPD with temperature (Luterbacher et al., 2004), precipitation (Pauling et al., 2006), and Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reconstructions 160 (Cook et al., 2015) for the three European AR6 regions: Northern Europe, Central Europe and Mediterranean (Iturbide et al., 2020). Furthermore, we show maps of the European summer VPD for selected and highlighted wet (1737, 1814, 1815) and dry (1616,1741,1821) years to investigate the spatial variability of our reconstruction (Brooks and Glasspoole, 1922;Pauling et al., 2006;Trigo et al., 2009;Brázdil et al., 2013;Cook et al., 2015;. Before this mapping, all VPD grid cells are centred and standardized (z-transformation) to present z-anomalies for each grid cell. ...
... According to a drought reconstruction for Czech, the drought of 1616 was one of five "outstanding drought events" since 1090 CE which began in the spring and continued throughout the summer with great heat and dried-up rivers (Brázdil et al., 2013). ...
The response of evapotranspiration to anthropogenic warming is of critical importance to the water and carbon cycle. Con-flicting observations about changes of evapotranspiration stem mostly from the brevity of observations in time and space as well as a high degree of internal variability. Here we present the first gridded reconstruction of the European summer vapour pressure deficit (VPD) for the past four centuries. The gridded reconstruction is based on 26 European tree-ring oxygen iso-tope records and is performed using a Random Forest approach. Based on our reconstruction, we show that from the mid-1700s a trend towards higher VPD occurred in Central Europe and the Mediterranean region which is based on the simulta-neous increase in temperature and decrease in precipitation. This increasing VPD trend continues throughout the observation-al period and recent times. Climate model projections show this increase in VPD for the Mediterranean region continuing until the end of the 21st century, whereby the extent depends on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, pro-jected VPD in North and Central Europe shows a tendency towards higher VPD only in the highest emission scenario (the produced data is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5958837 (Balting, D. F. et al., 2022).
... This seasonal cycle is essential in the global hydrological cycle, being the driver of water supply in a large part of the world: seasonal snow and glacier melt comprises the main water resource for up to 22% of the global population (Immerzeel et al., 2020;Kaser, Großhauser, & Marzeion, 2010). In the past, inhabitants of glacier-dominated regions have been spared when drought was imminent through lack of precipitation (Pritchard, 2019), such as in the 1540 drought in Central Europe (Brázdil et al., 2013;Pfister, 1999). Beyond these indirect impacts, SMB change can affect and cause other hydroclimatic events, including extremes such as droughts and floods. ...
... When considering the past millennium and the occurrence of droughts in Europe, particular dry conditions were prevailing in the MCA with dry summer especially between 1010 and 1165 (B€ untgen et al., 2010;Cook et al., 2015), while the LIA between 1430 and 1720 was subject to overall drier conditions (e.g., 15th and 16th centuries) but less pronounced compared to the MCA (B€ untgen et al., 2010). Severe droughts occurred in 1540, 1590, 1616, and 1718 including 1719 (Brázdil et al., 2013). Even though their analyses focus on the Czech Republic, the authors of this study assume that this region is representative for surrounding areas in Central Europe, since they form a homogeneous region, which acknowledges the fact that droughts are large-scale events in terms of both spatial (up to continental scale) and temporal dimension (several months and beyond). ...
... Even though their analyses focus on the Czech Republic, the authors of this study assume that this region is representative for surrounding areas in Central Europe, since they form a homogeneous region, which acknowledges the fact that droughts are large-scale events in terms of both spatial (up to continental scale) and temporal dimension (several months and beyond). For numerous historic drought events, the exact timing cannot be reconstructed accurately in terms of the affected period within in the year from the available sources, even though exceptions exist (Brázdil et al., 2013). The 1540 drought, for instance, was especially severe in terms of its length, since it covered a dry period from March 1540 until October 1540. ...
This chapter gives a brief overview on historical changes in hydroclimatic extreme events. Since the reconstruction of hydroclimatic extremes depends on proxy data (i.e., deriving hydroclimatic data from other sources of information, such as tree ring analyses or historic reports), no direct measurements of hydroclimatic extremes exist similar to those which are generally available nowadays. Here, we focus on hydroclimatic extremes in Europe and limit our analyses to the past millennium. From this look into the past, we gain insight into the question how hydroclimatic extremes changed at centennial and millennial scales and how those extremes relate to more recent extremes. The focus of this chapter is on the most relevant quantities in hydrology, for which extremes are of high practical relevance: precipitation, floods, and droughts. Our brief review reveals that concurrent (or at least more recent extremes) are not generally unprecedented but that event frequencies of a certain magnitude might suggest a shift toward more extreme weather conditions, associated with anthropogenic climate change.
... Currently, it is possibly one of the most popular indices for estimating dry and wet periods, but mainly droughts (e.g. Lloyd-Hughes and Saunders 2002; Bordi et al. 2004;Livada and Assimakopoulos 2007;Zhang et al. 2009;Brázdil et al. 2013Brázdil et al. , 2016Brázdil et al. , 2018Przybylak et al. 2020). In central Poland, the index helps to determine the occurrence and intensity of meteorological drought in various time scales (e.g. ...
This work presents the influence of atmospheric circulation on the occurrence of dry and wet periods in the central Polish region of Kujawy. The material on which the authors relied encompassed monthly totals of precipitation obtained from 10 weather stations in the period 1954–2018. Both dry and wet periods have been identified on the basis of monthly values of the Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI). Additionally, the calendar of circulation types over Central Poland was used to determine the atmospheric circulation indices: western (W), southern (S) and cyclonicity (C). The analyses have indicated that the region concerned experiences low precipitation totals in comparison with the rest of Poland. According to the circulation indices W, S and C, for Central Poland, the air mass advection from the West prevails over that from the East. Moreover, a slightly more frequent inflow of air from the South than from the North has been observed. The frequency of anticyclonic situations is higher than that of the cyclonic types in this part of Europe. Drought spells occurred in the study area at a clear dominance of anticyclonic circulation, with the inflow of air mostly from the North and with increased westerly circulation. On the other hand, the occurrence of wet periods was mainly influenced by cyclonic circulation during the advection of the masses from the South and West. Dry and wet periods accounted for 28% and 27% of the study period, respectively.
