The catastrophic floods in the Guadiana River basin since 1500 CE.

The task of retrieving information about past flood events is very important to reconstruct flood series data. In this work, a wide range of different sources including newspapers, technical reports, and books was consulted in order to recover information about catastrophic flood events in Badajoz (Spain). A set of 37 catastrophic floods of the Guadiana River that occurred in Badajoz in the winter months (DJFM - December, January, February, and March) have been recovered since 1500 CE. This strong seasonality constrain is due to the important influence of the large-scale circulation patterns in winter affecting the climate of the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, it is found that there is a clear difference between a higher number of floods in the 19th and 20th centuries and a substantial lower value of floods in the 16th-18th centuries. Finally, we evaluated the long-term evolution and inter-annual variability of the precipitation and the main large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns that govern climate variability in Iberia (NAO and EA modes) for the period 1851-1985. This analysis suggests that most extreme floods observed in this period (26 events) correspond to consecutive months with higher than usual precipitation, driven in part by unusual values of both the NAO and the EA modes of variability.

Dating historical droughts from religious ceremonies, the international pro pluvia rogation database.

Climate proxy data are required for improved understanding of climate variability and change in the pre-instrumental period. We present the first international initiative to compile and share information on pro pluvia rogation ceremonies, which is a well-studied proxy of agricultural drought. Currently, the database has more than 3500 dates of celebration of rogation ceremonies, providing information for 153 locations across 11 countries spanning the period from 1333 to 1949. This product provides data for better understanding of the pre-instrumental drought variability, validating natural proxies and model simulations, and multi-proxy rainfall reconstructions, amongst other climatic exercises. The database is freely available and can be easily accessed and visualized via http://inpro.unizar.es/ .

Early meteorological records from Latin-America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries.

This paper provides early instrumental data recovered for 20 countries of Latin-America and the Caribbean (Argentina, Bahamas, Belize, Brazil, British Guiana, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, France (Martinique and Guadalupe), Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, El Salvador and Suriname) during the 18th and 19th centuries. The main meteorological variables retrieved were air temperature, atmospheric pressure, and precipitation, but other variables, such as humidity, wind direction, and state of the sky were retrieved when possible. In total, more than 300,000 early instrumental data were rescued (96% with daily resolution). Especial effort was made to document all the available metadata in order to allow further post-processing. The compilation is far from being exhaustive, but the dataset will contribute to a better understanding of climate variability in the region, and to enlarging the period of overlap between instrumental data and natural/documentary proxies.