This paper studies human response to drought in cities during the 17th century. It examines how the city government of Barcelona (Catalonia) responded to what we identify as the most significant drought events that occurred in the city during the years 1521–1825. Beyond the efforts to expand urban water supply sources and developing a network of windmills, we discuss how the city government compiled knowledge about water into a single book, conceived to be used by future water managers.

The paper presents the main features of droughts in Poland in the period 996–2015 based on proxy data (documentary and dendrochronological) and instrumental measurements of precipitation. More than 100 droughts were found in documentary sources from the mid-15th century to the end of the 18th century with a maximum in the second halves of the 17th and, particularly, the 18th century. The long-term frequency of droughts in Poland has been stable for the last two or three centuries.

We developed a new dataset of historical documents by compiling records (rogation ceremonies) from 13 cities in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula (IP). These records were transformed into quantitative continuous data to develop drought indices (DIs). We regionalized them by creating three DIs (Ebro Valle, Mediterranean, and Mountain), which cover the period from 1650 to 1899 CE. We identified extreme drought years and periods which help to understand climate variability in the IP.

In this paper we present the longest grape harvest date (GHD) record reconstructed to date, i.e. Beaune (France, Burgundy) 1354–2018. Drawing on unedited archive material, the series is validated using the long Paris temperature series that goes back to 1658 and was used to assess April-to-July temperatures from 1354 to 2018. The distribution of extremely early GHD is uneven over the 664-year-long period of the series and mirrors the rapid global warming from 1988 to 2018.

The historical climatology has remarkable research potentialities. However, historical climatology has some methodological limitations. This study presents a new methodology (COST) that allows us to perform climate reconstructions with monthly resolution. The variability of the climatic series obtained are coherent with previous studies. The new proposed method is objective and is not affected by social changes, which allows us to perform studies in regions with different languages and cultures.

The paper analyses extreme droughts of the pre-instrumental period (1501–1803) over the territory of the recent Czech Republic. In total, 16 droughts were selected for spring, summer and autumn each and 14 droughts for summer half-year (Apr–Sep). They are characterized by very low values of drought indices, high temperatures, low precipitation and by the influence of high-pressure situations. Selected extreme droughts are described in more detail. Effect of droughts on grain prices are studied.

The paper presents a worldwide state of the art of droughts fluctuations based on documentary data. It gives an overview of achievements related to different kinds of documentary evidence with their examples and an overview of papers presenting long-term drought chronologies over the individual continents, analysis of the most outstanding drought events, the influence of external forcing and large-scale climate drivers, and human impacts and responses. It recommends future research directions.

This study presents a 414-year growing season minimum temperature reconstruction based on Korean pine tree-ring series at Laobai Mountain, northeast China. It developed a more than 400-year climate record in this area for the first time. This reconstruction showed six cold periods, seven warm periods, and natural disaster records of extreme climate events.

In this paper, we apply a new hydro-climatic reconstruction method on the Caniapiscau Reservoir (Canada), compare the obtained streamflow time series against time series derived from dendrohydrology by other authors on the same catchment, and study the natural streamflow variability over the 1881–2011 period. This new reconstruction is based on a historical reanalysis of global geopotential height fields and aims to produce daily streamflow time series (using a rainfall–runoff model).

In this paper we reconstruct the annual temperature anomalies in South Central China from 1850 to 2008, using phenodates of plants, snowfall days, and five tree-ring width chronologies. It is found that rapid warming has occurred since the 1990s, with an abrupt change around 1997, leading to unprecedented variability in warming; a cold interval dominated the 1860s, 1890s, and 1950s; warm decades occurred around 1850, 1870, and 1960; and the warmest decades were the 1990s–2000s.