Rogation ceremonies: a key to understanding past drought variability in northeastern Spain since 1650

Abstract

Abstract. In the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, few studies have reconstructed drought occurrence and variability for the pre-instrumental period using documentary evidence and natural proxies. In this study, we compiled a unique dataset of rogation ceremonies – religious acts asking God for rain – from 13 cities in the northeast of Spain and investigated the annual drought variability from 1650 to 1899 CE. Three regionally different coherent areas (Mediterranean, Ebro Valley, and Mountain) were detected. Both the Barcelona and the regional Mediterranean drought indices were compared with the instrumental series of Barcelona for the overlapping period (1787–1899), where we discovered a highly significant and stable correlation with the Standardized Precipitation Index of May with a 4-month lag (r=-0.46 and r=-0.53; p<0.001, respectively). We found common periods with prolonged droughts (during the mid and late 18th century) and extreme drought years (1775, 1798, 1753, 1691, and 1817) associated with more atmospheric blocking situations. A superposed epoch analysis (SEA) was performed showing a significant decrease in drought events 1 year after the volcanic events, which might be explained by the decrease in evapotranspiration due to reduction in surface temperatures and, consequently, the higher availability of water that increases soil moisture. In addition, we discovered a common and significant drought response in the three regional drought indices 2 years after the Tambora volcanic eruption. Our study suggests that documented information on rogation ceremonies contains important independent evidence to reconstruct extreme drought events in areas and periods for which instrumental information and other proxies are scarce. However, drought index for the mountainous areas (denoted Mountain later in the text) presents various limitations and its interpretation must be treated with caution.

Recovering Climate Data from Documentary Sources: A Study on the Climate in the South of Spain from 1792 to 1808

“…The reports are a brief summary in which the editors give information for each province. Therefore, the information provided is basically a spatial In historical climatology, there are various methods to reconstruct climatic conditions by analysing documentary sources [14][15][16][17][18][19]. In our case, given the nature of the data source under study (a printed periodical), and its weekly resolution in which not only extreme phenomena are described, the most appropriate method is to analyse the weather descriptors used in the texts.…”

Central Europe, 1531–1540 CE: The driest summer decade of the past five centuries?

“…Munzar, 2004;Wetter et al, 2014;Kiss and Nikolić, 2015;Roggenkamp and Herget, 2015;Brázdil et al, 2016bBrázdil et al, , 2019aKiss, 2017Bauch et al, 2020;Camenisch et al, 2020) and for creation of a range of long-term drought chronologies (e.g. Martín-Vide and Barriendos Vallvé, 1995;Piervitali and Colacino, 2001;Domínguez-Castro et al, 2008;Diodato and Bellocchi, 2011;Brázdil et al, 2013a;Garnier, 2019;Tejedor et al, 2019;Przybylak et al, 2020). It is even possible, by means of documentary-based temperature and precipitation reconstructions, to calculate long-term series of drought indices overlapping the pre-instrumental and instrumental periods (Brázdil et al, 2016a).…”

Pro-Pluvia Rogation Ceremonies in Extremadura (Spain): Are They a Good Proxy of Winter NAO?

“…Due to the rogations can be found where Catholic religion was established and historical manuscripts were preserved, rogations can be found in different parts of the world as Europe (mainly), America, and old colonies (as Philippines) [15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Pro-pluvia rogations have been studied, among others, to reconstruct periods of drought in the past [17,19,20,[22][23][24][25][26][27]; to reconstruct seasonal and annual rainfall in the Iberian Peninsula (hereafter IP) from 16th century to 20th century [28]; and, to identify climate extremes [16,29]. Also, Vicente-Serrano & Cuadrat [30] used pro-pluvia and pro-serenitate rogations celebrated in Zaragoza (Spain) as a proxy of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index.…”