Project information
Climatic Variability and Hydrometeorological Extremes in the Pre-instrumental Period

The investigation of recent and future climate variability and hydrometeorological extremes, mainly with respect to recent global warming, has to be concentrated on studies in a long-term context. For the pre-instrumental period (to the mid-19th century), it is possible to base it on so-called documentary evidence (i.e. different written documents containing direct information about weather or its impacts). Such data is available in Central Europe for the past millennium, but the extraction, elaboration and analysis is limited by national borders as well as interdisciplinary barriers. The proposed project is trying to overcome these problems on the level of the Czech Republic and Austria combining natural and historical approaches to this topic having in mind gradually including scientists from other European countries. The project is concentrated on the creation of databases of basic climatological data, to be compared and completed together, and its consequent analysis with the aim to study temporal and spatial climate variability in a long-term scale. Another focus of the project is a study of important hydrometeorological extremes (floods, droughts, windstorms etc.) with respect to their frequency, course, causes, severity and impacts on human society.