Abstract
<jats:p>Drought is a recurring phenomenon in the Mediterranean climate that characterizes the Iberian Peninsula, but its manifestations vary in duration, extent, and severity. Studying it using current instrumental meteorological records poses no difficulties, and techniques exist for its calculation and graphical and cartographic representation. However, to understand the patterns of this phenomenon in its most severe and least frequent manifestations, one must rely on historical documentary sources that allow drought impacts to be identified and analysed at daily temporal resolution over the last five centuries.In this study, we used data from the AMARNA platform, which contains 12,012 cases or units of information distributed in 1,672 drought episodes from 1450 to 1950 for the whole of Spain. This information on droughts has been obtained from historical documentary sources containing records of liturgical rogation ceremonies for rain (“pro pluvia”). These ceremonies were commissioned by municipal authorities to address this adversity, which affected the development of agricultural crops.Each case corresponds to a specific rain-praying ceremony that was held and recorded in the official records. All records available in AMARNA have been subjected to a series of filters to exclude sporadic or scattered information from the analysis, and to focus the analysis on the episodes of greatest relevance and information density. Having access to AMARNA data allows us to characterise the behaviour of major drought episodes during the Little Ice Age and to place them in the context of the instrumental period.Using data on recorded cases from AMARNA, a methodology has been developed to classify drought episodes according to their duration, spatial extent, intensity and documentary evidence density. The proposed classification provides a framework for identifying and comparing the most significant drought episodes currently known in Spain between 1450 and 1950. It also offers new opportunities to investigate long-term drought variability, spatial patterns, and the occurrence of extreme events during the Little Ice Age and the transition to the modern climatic period. AcknowledgementsThe authors acknowledge the grants from FLOODMED (PID2024-157662OB-C22), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and by ERDF/EU.</jats:p>