Drought and Flood Extremes on the Amazon River and in Northeast Brazil, 1790–1900

Abstract

Recent severe droughts, extreme floods, and increasing differences between seasonal high and low flows on the Amazon River may represent a 21st century increase in the amplitude of the hydrologic cycle over the Amazon Basin. These precipitation and streamflow changes may have arisen from natural ocean-atmospheric variability, deforestation within the drainage basin of the Amazon River, or from anthropogenic climate change. Tree-ring reconstructions of wet season precipitation extremes, substantiated with historical accounts of climate and river levels on the Amazon River and in northeast Brazil found in the Brazilian Digital Library, indicate that the recent river level extremes on the Amazon may have been equaled or possibly exceeded during the pre-instrumental 19th century. The “Forgotten Drought” of 1865 was the lowest wet season rainfall total reconstructed with tree-rings in the eastern Amazon from 1790-2016 and appears to have been one of the lowest stream levels observed on the Amazon River during the historical era according to first-hand descriptions by Louis Agassiz, his Brazilian colleague João Martins da Silva Coutinho, and others. Heavy rains and flooding are described during most of the tree-ring reconstructed wet extremes, including the complete inundation of “First Street” in Santarem in 1859 and the overtopping of the Bittencourt Bridge in Manaus in 1892. These extremes in the tree ring estimates and historical observations indicate that recent high and low flow anomalies on the Amazon River may not have exceeded the natural variability of precipitation and streamflow during the 19th century.