Droughts in the Czech Lands during the 18th century

Investor logo
Investor logo

Warning

This publication doesn't include Faculty of Sports Studies. It includes Faculty of Science. Official publication website can be found on muni.cz.
Authors

BRÁZDIL Rudolf ŘEZNÍČKOVÁ Ladislava KOTYZA Oldřich VALÁŠEK Hubert DOBROVOLNÝ Petr

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

Faculty of Science

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.
Related projects:

You are running an old browser version. We recommend updating your browser to its latest version.

More info