![]() ![]() ![]() "The Old World Drought Atlas fills a major geographic gap in the data that’s important to determine patterns of climate variability back in time," said Edward Cook, cofounder of the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and leader of all three drought-atlas projects. A paper describing the new atlas, coauthored by scientists from 40 institutions, appears today in the journal Science Advances. In so doing, it should help climate scientists pinpoint causes of drought and extreme rainfall in the past, and identify patterns that could lead to better climate model projections for the future. ![]() Together with two previous drought atlases covering North America and Asia, the Old World Drought Atlas significantly adds to the historical picture of long-term climate variability over the Northern Hemisphere. Now, for the first time, an atlas based on scientific evidence provides the big picture, using tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe, and parts of North Africa and the Middle East, year to year over the past 2,000 years. The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals, each chronicling the impact in a geographically restricted area. (Queen Mary’s Psalter, Wikimedia commons) Here, an English calendar page, circa 1310, shows men harvesting wheat. Numerous droughts have hit European agriculture over the ages, but their overall extent has been known mainly from scattered historical documents. ![]()
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