Murphy, Conor and Noone, Simon and Duffy, Catriona and Broderick, Ciaran and Matthews, Tom K.R. and Wilby, Robert L. (2017) Irish droughts in newspaper archives: rediscovering forgotten hazards? Weather, 72 (6). pp. 151-155. ISSN 1477-8696

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Abstract

‘Irish drought’ might appear to be an oxymoron. However, the island of Ireland has been surprisingly drought prone over the last couple of centuries, but perhaps less so in living memory. We recently established a 160-year drought catalogue for the island covering the period 1850–2015 (Noone et al., 2015; Wilby et al., 2015). This was subsequently extended by Noone et al. (2017) to create a 250-year drought catalogue for Ireland (1765–2015) based on the Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI). In constructing this extended drought catalogue we used documentary sources from newspaper archives spanning the last 250 years. Together with other historical sources, these add confidence to the quantitative detection of drought episodes from rainfall records and provide glimpses into the socioeconomic impacts of historic droughts.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Irish droughts; newspaper archives; rediscovering forgotten hazards;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units, ICARUS
Item ID:	8885
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.2904
Depositing User:	Conor Murphy
Date Deposited:	11 Oct 2017 14:24
Journal or Publication Title:	Weather
Publisher:	Royal Meteorological Society
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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