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The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case

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A Commentary to this article was published on 09 May 2015

An Erratum to this article was published on 11 July 2014

Abstract

The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent reconstruction of spring–summer temperatures for WE resulted in the likelihood of significantly higher temperatures in 1540. In order to check the plausibility of this result we investigated the severity of the 1540 drought by putting forward the argument of the known soil desiccation-temperature feedback. Based on more than 300 first-hand documentary weather report sources originating from an area of 2 to 3 million km2, we show that Europe was affected by an unprecedented 11-month-long Megadrought. The estimated number of precipitation days and precipitation amount for Central and Western Europe in 1540 is significantly lower than the 100-year minima of the instrumental measurement period for spring, summer and autumn. This result is supported by independent documentary evidence about extremely low river flows and Europe-wide wild-, forest- and settlement fires. We found that an event of this severity cannot be simulated by state-of-the-art climate models.

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgements are due to the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant 100011–120157), the Oeschger Centre for Climatic Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, the Dr. H. A. Vögelin-Bienz-Stiftung, the Joséphine de Kármán-Stiftung for funding support of Oliver Wetter (OW). Eduardo Zorita (EZ), Sebastian Wagner (SW), Johannes Werner (JW) and Jürg Luterbacher (JL) acknowledge the German Science Fundation DFG Project PRIME 2 (“Precipitation In past Millennia in Europe- extension back to Roman times”) within the Priority Programme “INTERDYNAMIK”. JW, JL, SW and EZ are partially funded by the project of the German Science Foundation PRIME-2. Further acknowledgments are due to the Project “Reconstruction and model simulations of past climate in Portugal, using documentary and early instrumental sources (PTDC/AAC- CLI/119078/2010). Mariano Barriendos (MB) acknowledges the Spanish Ministery of Economy and Competitiveness for project I + D + i nr. CGL2011-28255 and the European Commission for project IP017008-2 “MILLENNIUM”. Rudolf Brázdil (RB) and Petr Dobrovolný (PD) acknowledge the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) for projects no. 13-19831S (RB) and 13-04291S (PD). Danuta Limanówka (DL) acknowledges the support by the Polish State Committee for Scientific Research (KBN): grant No. PO4E 024 10 and MNiSW grant No. 356/6. PR UE/2007/7. Samuli Helama, Finnish Forest Research Institute, Helsinki, Finnland is acknowledged for providing his long term tree ring series.

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Wetter, O., Pfister, C., Werner, J.P. et al. The year-long unprecedented European heat and drought of 1540 – a worst case. Climatic Change 125, 349–363 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1184-2

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