Process, spatial pattern and impacts of 1743 Extreme heat: From the perspective of historical documents

Tao, Le; Su, Yun; Chen, Xudong; Tian, Fangyu

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3

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https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3

Preprints

25 Jan 2024

| 25 Jan 2024

Status: this preprint is currently under review for the journal CP.

Process, spatial pattern and impacts of 1743 Extreme heat: From the perspective of historical documents

Le Tao, Yun Su, Xudong Chen, and Fangyu Tian

Abstract. The study of historical extreme heat is helpful to understand modern heat waves. By collecting 63 historical documents from 3 kinds of historical materials and using methods of text analysis methods based on keywords, grading and classification, this research recovered and analyzed the process over time, the spatial pattern of the heat severity and the extreme heat impact of the North China extreme heat in 1743. The results show: 1) The extreme heat of 1743 began to noticed by people on June 22, began to kill people on July 14, and was most severe and attracted great attention from the central government between July 14 and 25. 2) The extreme heat occurred in the plains north of the Yellow River and in the valleys of southwestern Shanxi. Areas in the plains east of the Taihang Mountains such as Baoding, Shijiazhuang, and Xingtai suffered worst heat. They are also at high risk for heat waves in the North China Plain in modern times. 3) In 1743, the heat affected people, animals, plants and facilities, with the most severe impact of human deaths. The death toll in a single county reached dozens in a single day. Timely cooling and reducing exposure are limited but necessary means to deal with high temperatures in both ancient and modern times.

Received: 14 Jan 2024 – Discussion started: 25 Jan 2024

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Le Tao, Yun Su, Xudong Chen, and Fangyu Tian

Status: final response (author comments only)

RC1:
'Comment on cp-2024-3', Anonymous Referee #1, 29 Jan 2024

This paper analysed an extreme heat wave in history. The topic is certainly interesting. The authors carefully examined relevant Chinese historical records, and compared them with other relevant sources. it shall be suitable for CPD after major revision.
My major concern and suggestion are as following,

1. It is necessary to state what has been done by previous researches, e.g. Zhang & Demaree (2004), and the academic significance of this study.

2. Crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind, rather than extreme heat.

3. Is it possible to compare the heat wave in northern China with the historical records of other East Asian countries? It would be helpful to better understand the weather background of this event.

4. In order to give a temporal scenario of historical heat wave of the study area, it is necessary to establish the chronologies of heat wave and precipitation, though it is understandable that the historical records about heat wave are not complete. A comparison of these two chronologies would be helpful to better understand the frequency and climate background of historical heat wave.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Su Yun, 17 Feb 2024
  
  We are very grateful to reviewer for reviewing our manuscript and giving valuable suggestions. Your suggestions will play an important role in improving the quality of our manuscript and inspire our future research.
  
  We responded the comments with explaining our revisions point by point as follow.
  1. It is necessary to state what has been done by previous researches, e.g. Zhang & Demaree (2004), and the academic significance of this study.
  We are grateful to the reviewer for this comment, which is very helpful in further clarifying the scientific significance of our study.
  
  The research of Zhang & Demaree (2004), including its preciousness and inspiration for our study, have been presented and analyzed in the introduction (see pp2 L51-58, in preprint). As mentioned, this study was critical and important, but its data were sporadic and early instrumental data. Their study was fortunate and fortuitous. The main advance of our study is to explore some feasible ways of analyzing the textual records of extreme heat events, while obtaining more information that have received less attention in previous studies from the records.
  
  We are going to clarify our goal by reorganizing the language in section 1:
  
  1) We will adjust the last sentence of the paragraph 3 to the 2nd sentence to make it more prominent, so that the purpose of our research can be clarified. (pp2, L49 & L42, in preprint)
  
  2) “by means of textual analysis methods” will be added to the end of the first sentence of paragraph 5 to emphasize our differences in methodology with previous research. (pp2, L61, in preprint)
  2. Crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind, rather than extreme heat.
  We thank the reviewer for this comment, which have deepened our understanding of the agricultural disaster mechanisms of heat and drought.
  
  Since this study starts from the textual records, we have categorized and discussed the various impacts that appear in the text. Crop failure is a specific type of impact that can be identified separately and is therefore presented and further discussed. Human life and health impact are still the most dominant and serious, and are the focus of our attention.
  
  Our main revisions in response to this comment are as follows:
  
  1) In section 2.3.3 we will add the selection criteria of agricultural impacts records, and add an explanation of the mechanism of crop failure causation referred in the comment. The added text will be:
  
  “It should be emphasized that only if the text clearly indicates that the crop is damaged by heat, it is counted as (2). However, crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind. It is difficult to identify how much was influenced by temperature.”
  
  (it will be added in pp7, L177, after the word “hunger”, in preprint)
  
  2) In section 4.2.1 we are going to emphasize the nature of heat-caused disasters in the chain of impacts, which is crop damage caused by concurrency with droughts or dry and hot winds.
  
  The transmit chain 3) will be “Heat (combined with drought or wind) → Crop damage → Reduced food production → Hungry people/Rising food prices” (pp13, L272, in preprint).
  3. Is it possible to compare the heat wave in northern China with the historical records of other East Asian countries? It would be helpful to better understand the weather background of this event.
  We thank the reviewer for this comment, which help us to better achieve the goals of the discussion in 4.3.
  
  A discussion of the phenology evidence from Japan and China will be supplemented in section 4.3. However, it is a little pity that they only corroborated on long time scales that 1743 was at the beginning of a warm period. High-resolution weather evidence for other regions at the same time in 1743 is still lacking. This hinders our understanding of the causal mechanisms of high temperatures at shorter weather scales. These will also be explained in the text of section 4.3 .
  
  Our supplement discussion is:
  
  More climatic records from East Asia also support this phenomenon. For example, climatic records from both Japan and Beijing indicate that the 1740s were the beginning of the warm period _{(Aono and Kazui, 2008; Liu and Fang, 2017; Aono and Nishitani, 2022). Unfortunately, it is difficult to find high-resolution weather records that are close to the study area and cover the year 1743. This has somewhat hindered our understanding of the mechanism of this extreme heat event.”}
  
  _{(Aono, Y. and Kazui, K.: Phenological data series of cherry tree flowering in Kyoto, Japan, and its application to reconstruction of springtime temperatures since the 9th century, 28(7): 905-914. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.1594, 2008.}
  
  _{Aono, Y. and Nishitani, A.: Reconstruction of April temperatures in Kyoto, Japan, since the fifteenth century using the floral phenology of herbaceous peony and rabbit-ear iris, International Journal of Biometeorology, 66(5): 883-893. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02245-x, 2022.}
  
  _{Liu, Y. and Fang, X.: Reconstruction of spring phenology and temperature in Beijing, China, from A.D. 1741 to 1832, 37(15): 5080-5088. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5145, 2017.)}
  
  _{(the text will be added to pp16, L351, the end of the paragraph, in preprint)}
  4. In order to give a temporal scenario of historical heat wave of the study area, it is necessary to establish the chronologies of heat wave and precipitation, though it is understandable that the historical records about heat wave are not complete. A comparison of these two chronologies would be helpful to better understand the frequency and climate background of historical heat wave.
  Thank you very much for your suggestion, which will be of great help to readers in understanding the context of climate change in North China during the historical period and in understanding the specificity of the case.
  
  After consideration, we are going to add two sequences about study area in Fig. 1(a new figure can be found in the supplement), they are the sequence of number of extreme heat records, and, the drought and flood index (both are from 1500 to 1911 CE). A description of the climate change profile of the study area and the particularity of 1743 are also will be add to the text.
  
  The added text would be:
  
  “As mentioned in the introduction, there are very few records (from local annals) of extreme heat events in the study area during the last 500 years, and the year 1743 is very prominent presence (Fig.1(c)). The drought and flood index sequence in the study area are also shown in comparison to give a temporal scenario of study area, and it can be seen that 1743 was a dry year in a relatively wet phase (Fig 1(c)).”
  
  (the text will be added to pp3, L76, at the end of the paragraph, in preprint)
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3-AC1
- AC3: 'Reply on RC1', Su Yun, 17 Feb 2024
  
  (We have re-uploaded the reply due to typographical mess in the previous one)
  We are very grateful to reviewer for reviewing our manuscript and giving valuable suggestions. Your suggestions will play an important role in improving the quality of our manuscript and inspire our future research.
  
  We responded the comments with explaining our revisions point by point as follow.
  1. It is necessary to state what has been done by previous researches, e.g. Zhang & Demaree (2004), and the academic significance of this study.
  We are grateful to the reviewer for this comment, which is very helpful in further clarifying the scientific significance of our study.
  The research of Zhang & Demaree (2004), including its preciousness and inspiration for our study, have been presented and analyzed in the introduction (see pp2 L51-58, in preprint). As mentioned, this study was critical and important, but its data were sporadic and early instrumental data. Their study was fortunate and fortuitous. The main advance of our study is to explore some feasible ways of analyzing the textual records of extreme heat events, while obtaining more information that have received less attention in previous studies from the records.
  We are still going to clarify our goal by reorganizing the language in section 1:
  
  1) We will adjust the last sentence of the paragraph 3 to the 2nd sentence to make it more prominent, so that the purpose of our research can be clarified. (pp2, L49 & L42, in preprint)
  
  2) “by means of textual analysis methods” will be added to the end of the first sentence of paragraph 5 to emphasize our differences in methodology with previous research. (pp2, L61, in preprint)
  2. Crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind, rather than extreme heat.
  We thank the reviewer for this comment, which have deepened our understanding of the agricultural disaster mechanisms of heat and drought.
  Since this study starts from the textual records, we have categorized and discussed the various impacts that appear in the text. Crop failure is a specific type of impact that can be identified separately and is therefore presented and further discussed. Human life and health impact are still the most dominant and serious, and are the focus of our attention.
  Our main revisions in response to this comment are as follows:
  
  1) In section 2.3.3 we will add the selection criteria of agricultural impacts records, and add an explanation of the mechanism of crop failure causation referred in the comment. The added text will be:
  
  “It should be emphasized that only if the text clearly indicates that the crop is damaged by heat, it is counted as (2). However, crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind. It is difficult to identify how much was influenced by temperature.”
  
  (it will be added in pp7, L177, after the word “hunger”, in preprint)
  
  2) In section 4.2.1 we are going to emphasize the nature of heat-caused disasters in the chain of impacts, which is crop damage caused by concurrency with droughts or dry and hot winds.
  
  The transmit chain 3) will be “Heat (combined with drought or wind) → Crop damage → Reduced food production → Hungry people/Rising food prices” (pp13, L272, in preprint).
  3. Is it possible to compare the heat wave in northern China with the historical records of other East Asian countries? It would be helpful to better understand the weather background of this event.
  We thank the reviewer for this comment, which help us to better achieve the goals of the discussion in 4.3.
  A discussion of the phenology evidence from Japan and China will be supplemented in section 4.3. However, it is a little pity that they only corroborated on long time scales that 1743 was at the beginning of a warm period. High-resolution weather evidence for other regions at the same time in 1743 is still lacking. This hinders our understanding of the causal mechanisms of high temperatures at shorter weather scales. These will also be explained in the text of section 4.3 .
  Our supplement discussion is:
  
  More climatic records from East Asia also support this phenomenon. For example, climatic records from both Japan and Beijing indicate that the 1740s were the beginning of the warm period (Aono and Kazui, 2008; Liu and Fang, 2017; Aono and Nishitani, 2022). Unfortunately, it is difficult to find high-resolution weather records that are close to the study area and cover the year 1743. This has somewhat hindered our understanding of the mechanism of this extreme heat event.”
  (the text will be added to pp16, L351, the end of the paragraph, in preprint)
  Added references：
  Aono, Y. and Kazui, K.: Phenological data series of cherry tree flowering in Kyoto, Japan, and its application to reconstruction of springtime temperatures since the 9th century, 28(7): 905-914. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.1594, 2008.
  Aono, Y. and Nishitani, A.: Reconstruction of April temperatures in Kyoto, Japan, since the fifteenth century using the floral phenology of herbaceous peony and rabbit-ear iris, International Journal of Biometeorology, 66(5): 883-893. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02245-x, 2022.
  Liu, Y. and Fang, X.: Reconstruction of spring phenology and temperature in Beijing, China, from A.D. 1741 to 1832, 37(15): 5080-5088. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5145, 2017.)
  
  4. In order to give a temporal scenario of historical heat wave of the study area, it is necessary to establish the chronologies of heat wave and precipitation, though it is understandable that the historical records about heat wave are not complete. A comparison of these two chronologies would be helpful to better understand the frequency and climate background of historical heat wave.
  Thank you very much for your suggestion, which will be of great help to readers in understanding the context of climate change in North China during the historical period and in understanding the specificity of the case.
  After consideration, we are going to add two sequences about study area in Fig. 1(a new figure can be found in the supplement), they are the sequence of number of extreme heat records, and, the drought and flood index (both are from 1500 to 1911 CE). A description of the climate change profile of the study area and the particularity of 1743 are also will be add to the text.
  
  The added text would be:
  
  “As mentioned in the introduction, there are very few records (from local annals) of extreme heat events in the study area during the last 500 years, and the year 1743 is very prominent presence (Fig.1(c)). The drought and flood index sequence in the study area are also shown in comparison to give a temporal scenario of study area, and it can be seen that 1743 was a dry year in a relatively wet phase (Fig 1(c)).”
  
  (the text will be added to pp3, L76, at the end of the paragraph, in preprint)
  Added references：
  Hao, Z., Bai, M., Zheng, J., et al. (2022). Hydroclimate gridded dataset for eastern China during the last millennium (Version 1.0), World Data Center for Climate (WDCC) at DKRZ.https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/HydrocGDForEChinaTheLastMillV10
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3-AC3
CC1:
'Comment on cp-2024-3', Jia He, 30 Jan 2024

This manuscript describes how to obtain information about the heat wave of 1743 from among the Chinese historical documents. The author provides some detailed methods and ideas in textual information processing, they are non-quantitative. From this point of view the study is interesting and instructive for textual work. Also, the manuscript discusses aspects of 1743 in detail. It enhances the understanding of this event.
There are some points I'm curious about, and some suggestions for revisions for authors.
Major revisions:
Section 2.2.1- The authors refer to a total of three types of data sources. Was this hot event not reported in other records? The reasons for choosing these three categories need to be explained. In addition, it appears from the results that Data 2 and Data 3 were only used to illustrate the progression of the heat. Data 3 provided only 2 records, which is a very small number and perhaps needs to be accounted for.
Table 3 - How was the last column "Timescale of impact" obtained? This is not clearly described in the text. Correspondingly, how is Figure 4(e) plotted? This is a very important result. I think it is necessary for the authors to explain how it was converted from a textual record to a graph.
4.1.1 The authors give a demonstration of inferring temperatures from the coolness index. This is an interesting attempt. However, it is rather brief in discussing the limitations of textual records when it comes to physical quantification. A point to note is perhaps that body temperature is a composite perception of the environment and is influenced by factors other than temperature. There are also individual differences in body temperature between different people. This is not only limitation of the textual record.

Minor Revision:
P14，L298 - The meaning of "Tmax" needs to be explained.
Table 5 - Abbreviations for the serial numbers of the headings is used, which is inconsistent with the other tables, so please note to revise.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3-CC1
- AC2: 'Reply on CC1', Su Yun, 17 Feb 2024
  
  We are very grateful to the comments and suggestions. Your suggestions will play an important role in improving the quality of our manuscript and inspire our future research.
  
  We responded the comments with explaining our revisions point by point as follow.
  Major revisions:
  
  1. Section 2.2.1- The authors refer to a total of three types of data sources. Was this hot event not reported in other records? The reasons for choosing these three categories need to be explained. In addition, it appears from the results that Data 2 and Data 3 were only used to illustrate the progression of the heat. Data 3 provided only 2 records, which is a very small number and perhaps needs to be accounted for.
  Thank you very much for your comment, which can help better explaining the data of the study.
  
  We refer to the more commonly referenced documents or compilation on climate reconstruction in China during the Qing Dynasty. These three sources cover both local and central perspectives.
  
  R3 were staged submitted, so the records are less compared to the day-by-day record of R2. However, both R2 and R3 have more precise temporal properties and so have been used primarily in reconstructing progression of the heat. (has been mentioned in pp5, L117)
  
  Our modifications are as follows.
  
  1) in the first paragraph of 2.2.1 of the paper we will explain the choice of the three sources. The text:
  
  “Three documents covered local and centralized perspectives, and Each of them has its own advantages.”
  
  (will be added to pp4, L83, in preprint)
  
  2) we will explain why R3 records are less. The text:
  
  “Since R3 were staged submitted, there are fewer records about extreme heat compared to the day-by-day record of R2.”
  
  (will be added to pp5, L113, the end of the paragraph, in preprint)
  2. Table 3 - How was the last column "Timescale of impact" obtained? This is not clearly described in the text. Correspondingly, how is Figure 4(e) plotted? This is a very important result. I think it is necessary for the authors to explain how it was converted from a textual record to a graph.
  Thank you very much for your comment, which are helpful in refining our methodology.
  
  We will add clarification in section 2.3.3. The text:
  
  “We then counted the number of impact records that still existed for each month on a monthly basis. For example, impact records of population deaths, damage to facilities and animal injuries were counted up to the month in which they were recorded; impact records of crop failures were counted up to the month in which they were harvested; and economic and social impacts on this basis were counted up to the month in which they were expressed in the records.”
  
  (will be added to pp7, Line 178, in preprint, behind the word “persist”)
  3. 4.1.1 The authors give a demonstration of inferring temperatures from the coolness index. This is an interesting attempt. However, it is rather brief in discussing the limitations of textual records when it comes to physical quantification. A point to note is perhaps that body temperature is a composite perception of the environment and is influenced by factors other than temperature. There are also individual differences in body temperature between different people. This is not only limitation of the textual record.
  Thank you very much for your suggestion, which helps to improve the rigor of our discussion.
  
  We will provided additional clarification in our discussions. The text:
  
  “Body temperature is also a composite perception of the environment and is influenced by factors other than temperature. This is not only limitation of the textual record.”
  
  (will be added to pp13, L264, in preprint, at the end of the paragraph)
  Minor Revision:
  
  4. P14，L298 - The meaning of "Tmax" needs to be explained.
  Thanks for the reminder, we will explain it in the footnote.
  
  Tmax refers to the maximum value of the daily maximum temperature in the month.
  5. Table 5 - Abbreviations for the serial numbers of the headings is used, which is inconsistent with the other tables, so please note to revise.
  Thank you for pointing out the errors in the manuscript, we will correct “Tab.5” to “Table.5”.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3-AC2
RC2: 'Comment on cp-2024-3', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Apr 2024

The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://cp.copernicus.org/preprints/cp-2024-3/cp-2024-3-RC2-supplement.pdf

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3-RC2

Le Tao, Yun Su, Xudong Chen, and Fangyu Tian

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2024-3-supplement

Le Tao, Yun Su, Xudong Chen, and Fangyu Tian

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Short summary

Our study collected 63 historical documents about 1743 extreme heat from 3 kinds of historical materials. By methods of text analysis such as keywords extraction, grading and classification, the extreme heat in 1743 was recovered. The advances of this study are that: details of the process of heat wave development over time are given, spatially severe regions are identified, and the spatial and temporal characteristics of the impacts of extreme heat are discerned.


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