Droughts in the Czech Lands during the 18th century
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Global Change and Resilience. From Impacts to Responses. Proceedings of the 3rd annual Global Change and Resilience Conference |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Atmosphere sciences, meteorology |
| Keywords | droughts; documentary evidence; 18th century; Czech Lands |
| Description | This paper addresses dry episodes and droughts in the Czech Lands during the 18th century. It is based on various types of documentary evidence, including data describing phenomena related to drought patterns, from the occurrence of precipitation (or lack of it) to derived impacts (bad yields, water shortages, drying watercourses, etc.). The documentary data include various degrees of detail, but their interpretation allows work at the level of monthly resolution. Dry conditions for at least two consecutive months in a given year were considered as drought for our purposes. A total of 49 years with droughts were derived from documentary data, with the prevailing occurrence of dry months in the summer half-year (April–September: 66.0%) associated with the most severe impacts. This shows that probably all the droughts with two-year re-occurrence intervals were identified from the documentary data available. As examples of impacts and their territorial extent, some years with severe droughts in the eastern part of the Czech Lands, Moravia, are described (1718, 1719, 1726, 1746, and 1790). The results obtained are an important contribution to the more broadly-oriented study of droughts in the Czech Lands during the past 500 years based on documentary and instrumental data. |
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