Climatic and social factors behind the Spanish Mediterranean flood event chronologies from documentary sources (14th–20th centuries)

Abstract

The Spanish Mediterranean river basin provides a good background for studying floods from documentary and bibliographical sources within the specialty of historical climatology. This study region's long history of human occupation and climatic conditions together determine a high risk of flooding. As a result, there exists an enormous amount of documentary heritage containing flood information. However, the heterogeneity of documentary sources and different approaches to classifying floods through historical documents can generate some biases and uncertainties about the quantity and quality of the available data. For this reason, this paper proposes a methodology for reconstructing historical floods based on cross-referencing documentary sources. This approach, together with additional archival work, has allowed us to increase the number of flood series for the Spanish Mediterranean coast by 17% and has generated a surprising increase of 233% in the number of flood cases detected. The data obtained have allowed us to analyze the variability of floods and their relationship with climatic and social factors from the fourteenth century to the present. Different climatic oscillations related to the Little Ice Age are detected between the 14th and 19th centuries. Additionally, we detected a strong influence of the defense infrastructures and urban growth, which explain the recent flood trends. However, the difficulty in analyzing the influence of social factors on long-term flood behavior invites us to reflect on the need for further work for emphasizing these issues.

Extreme Floods in Small Mediterranean Catchments: Long-Term Response to Climate Variability and Change

“…These flood-rich periods, lasting a few decades (30-50 years), are followed by a longer period characterised by a lack of flood deposits and dominated by slope washout sediment deposits within the stratigraphic profiles. These four flood periods correlate in time with others described elsewhere in the Mediterranean based on historical documentary evidence [44,68,69], lake records [70,71], and alluvial records [72,73].…”

“…Climatically, periods 1 and 3 correspond to cooler than usual (about 0.3 • C and 0.2 • C) climatic oscillations within the Little Ice Age (1300-1870) (cf. [44,74]). An accepted explanation is that heavy torrential rainfalls developed when anomalous cold air depressions come into contact with humid warm surficial air in the Mediterranean Sea.…”

Synoptic causes of torrential rainfall in South-eastern Spain (1941–2017)

“…The seasonal and monthly distribution of the dates demonstrates that autumn, during which approximately 70% of the events occurred, is the critical season with October as the most prominent month; this is known from the historical compilation and reconstruction of floods as well (Gil Guirado et al, 2019;Barriendos et al, 2019). The autumnal concentration of the events analysed corresponds to the most negative values of the daily WeMOi at the aforementioned station throughout the year; this was already recognised by Meseguer-Ruiz et al (2018).…”

“…There are also studies that analyse one or several catastrophic events resulting in significant material losses in terms of agriculture, infrastructure and cities (Capel Molina, 1974;Pérez Cueva andArmengot, 1983, Gil Olcina, 1986;Pastor et al, 2001, Olcina et al, 2010Espín et al, 2017., etc). Still others reconstruct historical episodes (Barriendos et al, 2019). The relationship between intense rainfall and soil erosion in a region with a high intensity of erosive and desertification processes is a subject of particular focus (Romero Díaz et al, 1992, 1998Peña-Angulo et al, 2019).…”

What controls the coarse sediment yield to a Mediterranean delta? The case of the Llobregat River (NE Iberian Peninsula)

“…A historical bridge close to town D in Fig. 8 failed due to that event (Batalla, 2003). Similarly, the 2000 flood with a peak of 1500 m 3 /s (Sect.…”