Abstract
Several studies show that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an important factor in determining interannual rainfall variability in South America. This signal is detected in the region including Northeastern Argentina, Uruguay and part of southern Brazil, in the form of excessive rains and big floods in the regional rivers. To check that this relationship was similar in the past the objectives of this paper were to construct a time series of large floods in the Paraná River region from documentary records, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and to evaluate the relationship between that historical record of extreme floods, the ENSO documentary evidence (Ortlieb, The Documented Historical Record of El Niño Events in Perú: An Update of the Quinn Record (Ortlieb, sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, Diaz and Markgraf, (eds.), El Niño and the southern oscillation. Multiscale variability and global and regional Impacts. Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–295, 2001; Quinn and Neal, The historical record of El Niño events, Bradley and Jones (eds.), Climate since a.d. 1500, Routledges, pp. 623–648, 1992) and the temperature index of the Pacific Ocean (Mann ME et al., Global temperature patterns in past centuries: an interactive presentation, IGBP pages/world data center for paleoclimatology data contribution series #2000-075. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA, 2000). Considering that the period 1904–2000, where 11 out of 16 floods occurred during El Niño events, it can be concluded that the proportion of years with exceptional flow volume in the Paraná River in years with El Niño events in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was relatively lower than that of the twentieth century. The reason for this difference is discussed.
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Abbreviations
- AGI:
-
Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla
- AGN:
-
Archivo General de la Nación Argentina
- RAH:
-
Real Academia de la Historia–Madrid
- ACSF:
-
Actas Cabildo de la Ciudad de Santa Fe
- CA:
-
Cartas Anuas de los Jesuitas
- ACC:
-
Actas Capitulares de Corrientes
PUBLISHED SECONDARY HISTORICAL SOURCES
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Actas Capitulares de Corrientes: 1941–1942, Prólogo de Ricardo Levene, Academia Nacional de la Historia, Buenos Aires, 2 t.
Actas del Cabildo de la Ciudad de Santa Fe: 1942, Primera Serie, Tomos I y II, Junta Provincial de Estudios Históricos de Santa Fe, Impr. de la Prov. Santa Fe, Santa Fe.
Actas del Cabildo de la Ciudad de Santa Fe: 1942, Segunda Serie, T I, Junta Provincial de Estudios Históricos de Santa Fe, Impr. de la Prov. Santa Fe, Santa Fe.
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Prieto, M.d. ENSO signals in South America: rains and floods in the Paraná River region during colonial times. Climatic Change 83, 39–54 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-006-9188-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-006-9188-1