Recent summer droughts and heatwaves in Europe have had devastating ecological and economic consequences, which will worsen as the global climate continues to warm.
“We’re all aware of the cluster of exceptionally hot and dry summers we’ve had over the past few years, but we needed precise reconstructions of historical conditions to see how these recent extremes compare to previous years,” said first author Professor Ulf Büntgen from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, who is also affiliated with CzechGlobe Centre in Brno, Czech Republic. “Our results show that what we have experienced over the past five summers is extraordinary for central Europe, in terms of how dry it has been consecutively.”
Most studies attempting to reconstruct past climates are restricted to temperature, but stable isotopes in tree rings can provide annually-resolved and absolutely-dated information about hydroclimatic changes over long periods of time.
Büntgen and his colleagues from the Czech Republic, Germany and Switzerland studied more than 27,000 measurements of carbon and oxygen isotopic ratios from 147 living and dead European oak trees, covering a period of 2,110 years. The samples came from archaeological remains, subfossil materials, historical constructions and living trees from what is now the Czech Republic and parts of south-eastern Bavaria.
“Generally, our understanding is worse the further back we go back in time, as datasets looking at past drought conditions are rare,” said Büntgen, who is a specialist in dendrochronology, the study of data from tree-ring growth. “However, insights before medieval times are particularly vital, because they enable us to get a more complete picture of past drought variations, which were essential for the functioning and productivity of ecosystems and societies.”
