Increasing Incidence of Droughts Since Later Part of Little Ice Age Over North‐Western Himalaya, India

Abstract

Droughts are recurring phenomena in the north-western Himalaya causing severe socioeconomic hardships. Our understanding on temporal and spatial occurrence of such extreme droughts in long-term perspective is constrained due to limited short-term weather records. Toward fulfilling such a large data void, we developed a network of ring-width chronologies of Himalayan cedar from seven moisture stressed high-elevation sites in Kishtwar, Jammu & Kashmir. Moisture responsive ring-width chronologies were used to develop the annual Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI from previous year June to current year May (SPI12-May)) extending back to 1613 CE. The SPI reconstruction revealed annual to decadal-scale variability in droughts, which strikingly were more frequent and of larger magnitude during 1760s–2017 CE in comparison to the earlier part of the reconstruction (1613–1750s CE). Our SPI12-May record revealed strong consistency with other tree-ring-based hydrological records from the western Himalaya. Spatial correlation analyses revealed strong linkage of the SPI with Tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperature.