Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Based on the Encyclopedia of Historical Meteorological Disasters, this study summarizes and sorts out the drought and flood disaster events that occurred in Tuanfeng County, Huanggang Prefecture, Hubei Province, located south of the Dabie Mountains in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Furthermore, methods such as moving average, cumulative anomaly, and wavelet analysis are used to analyze the trend characteristics of drought and flood disasters and their response relationship with the climate background. The analysis reveals that there were 139 recorded drought and flood disasters with significant impacts in Tuanfeng County during the Ming and Qing dynasties, including 79 droughts and 60 floods, with droughts being more frequent than floods. During this period, drought and flood disasters showed obvious periodic characteristics and uneven distribution within the year. The frequency of disasters showed multi-periodic characteristics on the time scale, with oscillation periods roughly appearing at the scales of 8–13 years, 24–26 years, 38–42 years, and 55–60 years. The occurrence of drought and flood disasters has an obvious response relationship with the global climate background. To a certain extent, disasters are affected by El Niño phenomena, and they tend to occur in the transition stage between active and quiet periods. Under the background of climate cold and warm, droughts are more likely to occur in warm periods, and floods in cold periods. Through the analysis of historical drought and flood disasters in a representative county, this paper aims to reveal the relationship between drought and flood disasters in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and climate response.</p>