Hydroclimate Variations across North-Central China during the Past 530 Years and Their Relationships with Atmospheric Oscillations

Abstract

Detailed study of historical drought events in North-Central China (NCC) is important to understand current hydroclimate variability in the background of global warming. Here, we combined 12 published tree-ring chronologies and 12 dryness/wetness indices (DWI) to reconstruct dry and wet climate variability across NCC. These 24 proxy records showed similarly significant responses to warm season (May–June–July–August–September, MJJAS) moisture signals. A new 530-year-long reconstruction of self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) values for the warm season in NCC was determined using a nested principal component regression (PCR) approach. The new reconstruction shows significant correlations with the instrumental MJJAS scPDSI data across NCC during the period AD 1901–2012. The reconstructed MJJAS scPDSI revealed seven severe dry/wet events from AD 1470 to 2012. The periods AD 1701–1727 and AD 1985–2011 represent the longest dry periods, and the drought during the 1920s is identified as the most severe one over the past 530 years. Our reconstruction shows significant interannual spectral peaks at the frequency domain of 2–7 years, together with relatively weaker decadal frequencies of 16, 24, and 78 years. The results of superposed epoch analysis (SEA) show that extreme North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) years may modulate drought variability in NCC.