Abstract
In the late 1920’s, a mega-drought in China resulted in widespread crop failure and famine. Sufficient evidence suggests that this drought belonged to a dry period ranging from approximately 1922 to 1932. To understand the characteristics and the cause of this persistent drought period, we combined various data, including observations, tree ring proxy data, reanalysis data, simulation results of the Fifth Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project and numerical downscaling simulations. The results show that during 1922–1932, most regions in eastern China suffered from a persistent drought that lasted for six years, and the maximum negative precipitation anomaly reached −1.5 times the standard deviation. Given its spatial coverage, duration, and strength, the 1920s drought was unique for the 20th century. The 1920s drought was primarily caused by internal variability. Strong easterlies in lower latitudes, strong monsoon circulation, and abnormally high geopotential heights at middle and upper levels were responsible for the 1920s drought conditions in eastern China; these drought conditions could be further attributed to the joint impact of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Indian Ocean Basin Mode.
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Acknowledgements
Professor Sumin WANG and Xuemei SHAO provided background information and research ideas for this work, and we sincerely appreciate their contributions to this article. This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA20020201), the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0600403), the General Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41875134), the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0602501), and the Science and Technology Program of Yunnan “Impact assessments and monitorforecasting technology of meteorological disasters for Yunnan Plateau characteristic agriculture under climate change” (Grant No. 2018BC007). The work was carried out at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, and the calculations were performed on TianHe-1 (A).
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Luo, M., Feng, J., Xu, Z. et al. Numerical simulation and cause analysis of persistent summer drought during the 1920s in eastern China. Sci. China Earth Sci. 65, 966–982 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-021-9891-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-021-9891-9