Spatio-temporal variations of the major meteorological disasters and its response to climate change in Henan Province during the past two millennia

作者：Xiang Li, Hui Lu, Zhaokang Zhang, Wei Xing · 发表于：PeerJ · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.7717/peerj.12365 · 被引用次数：5 · 研究领域：Flood Risk Assessment and Management、Tropical and Extratropical Cyclones Research、Climate variability and models

In China, historical documents have recorded large quantities of information related to natural disasters, and these disasters have had long-lasting effects on economic and social activities. Understanding the occurrence of the natural disasters and their spatio-temporal variation characters is crucial for sustainable of our society. Therefore, based on the collection and collation of historical documents, and adopting mathematical statistics, Kriging interpolation, correlation analysis and other methods, we systematically explored the meteorological disasters in Henan Province during the past two millennia in analyzing their spatio-temporal distribution characters and driving forces. The results demonstrate that there were five major types of meteorological disasters in Henan Province, including drought, flood, hails, low temperature and frost and insect pests, which presented obvious spatio-temporal variations and have occurred frequently during the past two millennia. According to the historical documents, the major meteorological disasters occurred 1,929 times in Henan from 221 BCE to 2000 CE. On the whole, the disaster frequency show that the occurrence cycle of the meteorological disasters has obvious changes, which mainly occurred in the middle and late stages during the past two millennia, especially after 1300 CE. Furthermore, we also find that the variation of meteorological disaster events is consistent with the variation of temperature in eastern China and the fre...