Defining Drought - combining societal experiences with scientific understandings

Keywords: drought, environmental perception, human impact, environmental history, ireland
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17

Abstract

Whether from scientific or humanities perspectives, defining drought has proved immensely challenging. Providing a universal definition of drought is highly impractical given the need to consider everything from localised precipitation patterns, evaporation, transpiration, water flows and storage, to human interventions in the physical landscape (Lloyd Hughes, 2014). This is compounded when attempting to bring human experiences of droughts into conversation with scientific climate modelling of drought periods. While much recent research has focused on the use of documentary sources to inform and extend the historic catalogue of drought records (Brázdil et al, 2018), charting the evolving human impacts of and responses to drought periods has received markedly less attention. We are extending Ireland’s drought record to the medieval period using climatic records, tree ring data and archival sources and are specifically questioning what constitutes scientific and human impact droughts in Ireland. Systematic engagement with the Irish Annals, School’s Folklore Collection and Irish Newspaper Archive is enabling identification of noteworthy drought periods and detailed analysis of how these human/societal drought periods can be brought into conversation with the scientific record as defined by tree ring data, climate modelling and instrumental measurements. Focusing on droughts as defined by the Irish archival record, this paper will examine the spatio-temporal evolution of drought impacts across society and highlight key divergences and convergences between the human drought catalogue and the catalogue of scientifically defined drought. It will assess the potential and challenges in bringing people’s understanding of weather directly into conversation with climate knowledge.