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Impacts of hydrometeorological extremes in South Moravia based on documentary evidence
Chromá, Kateřina ; Dolák, Lukáš ; Brázdil, Rudolf ; Řezníčková, Ladislava
Hydrometeorological extremes have influenced human lives significantly in the past, just as they continue\nto do today. To analyse these influences in the past, information is needed from before the start of systematic\nmeteorological and hydrological observations. Documentary evidence constitutes a very rich source of\ninformation about past hydrometeorological extremes. This paper focuses on impacts of hydrometeorological\nextremes on agriculture and material property and their socio-economic consequences. It also discusses\nthe potential and limitations of such documentary evidence. Despite documentary evidence’s several\nlimitations (e.g. spatial and temporal uncertainty, uncertainty in the annual distribution of records, in\nthe type of extreme, etc.), it is a promising source of information useful for future studies.
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Documentary evidence as a source of data for studying droughts in the Czech lands
Řezníčková, Ladislava ; Brázdil, Rudolf ; Kotyza, O. ; Valášek, H.
Information about past droughts may be derived from the various kinds of documentary evidence. Documentary data are particularly applicable to the pre-instrumental period but may also be used for the overlapping period with instrumental records. They are extracted from written narrative sources, weather diaries, personal and official letters, newspapers, religious records, epigraphic sources, and other sources. Direct descriptions of weather facilitate identification of meteorological droughts, while descriptions of drought impacts are used to identify agricultural and hydrological droughts. Documentary evidence enabled the creation of series of precipitation indices which classify dry months on a scale of –1 (dry), –2 (very dry), and –3 (extremely dry). In this way, it is possible to study the frequency, seasonality, severity, and impacts of drought episodes in the pre-instrumental period.
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Documentary evidence in the study of past hydrometeorological extremes in South Moravia
Chromá, Kateřina ; Brázdil, Rudolf ; Valášek, H. ; Dolák, Lukáš ; Řezníčková, Ladislava
Information about hydrological and meteorological extremes (HMEs) in the instrumental period can be extended back into pre-instrumental times using documentary evidence from a variety of data sources. Financial and economic records, particularly those related to taxation data, are among the most important such sources. For the region of South Moravia, they are held by the Moravian Land Archives in the provincial capital of Brno and in certain equivalent state district archives that contain collections of estate accounts and family archives. Exploration of these sources provides information about HMEs in terms of dates and places of occurrence, courses, and impacts. Data of this kind from South Moravia were interpreted and included in a dedicated database, bringing the number of records of past HMEs to 2,010. This contribution demonstrates the high potential of this type of data.
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Droughts in the Czech Lands during 18th century
Brázdil, Rudolf ; Řezníčková, Ladislava ; Kotyza, O. ; Valášek, H. ; Dobrovolný, Petr
Th is 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.). Th e 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. Th is shows that probably all the droughts with two-year re-occurrence intervals were identifi ed 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). Th e 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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