Historic Drought from archives : Beyond the Instrumental Record
Résumé
This chapter aims at studying European historic droughts from archives extracted in several European country within the EU project DROUGHT-R&SPI (Fostering European Drought Research and Science-Policy Interfacing). In a first part, we present textual and rare instrumental data recorded in the archives since the 16th century by discriminating private diaries, municipal chronicles, meteorological journals, religious processions ‘for the rain’ and rare instrumental data. Then, this chapter addresses the methodological issue by proposing to use simultaneously textual description and a new Historical Severity Drought scale. Then we study different very extreme droughts occurred in Britain, Ile de France (around Paris) and in the valley of the Upper Rhine between the 16th century and the 2000s. Finally, we approach the social issue by questioning the interest of a European cultural risk memory interest in the prospect of a better resilience of our modern societies facing such a climatic threat.