A 1,000-year history of typhoon landfalls in guangdong, southern China, reconstructed from Chinese historical documentary records

lIn China, the abundance of historical documentary records in the form of F ang Zhi (semiofficial local gazettes) offers an extraordinary opportunity f or providing a high-resolution historical dataset for the frequency of typh oon strikes. We have reconstructed a 1,000-year time series of typhoon land falls in the Guangdong Province of southern China since AD 975 based on dat a compiled from Fang Zhi. Even though the 571 typhoon strikes recorded in t he historical documents probably underrepresent the total number of typhoon landfalls in Guangdong, calibration of the historical data against the obs ervations during the instrumental period 1884-1909 suggests that the trends of the two datasets are significantly correlated (r = 0.71), confirming th at the time series reconstructed from historical documentary evidence conta ins a reliable record of variability in typhoon landfalls. On a decadal tim escale, the twenty-year interval from AD 1660 to 1680 is the most active pe riod on record, with twenty-eight to thirty-seven typhoon landfalls per dec ade. The variability in typhoon landfalls in Guangdong mimics that observed in other paleoclimatic proxies (e.g., tree rings, ice cores) from China an d the northern hemisphere. Remarkably, the two periods of most frequent typ hoon strikes in Guangdong (AD 1660-1680, 1850-1880) coincide with two of th e coldest and driest periods in northern and central China during the Littl e Ice Age. Conceivably, the predominant storm tracks shifted to the south d uring these cold periods, resulting in fewer landfalls in Japan and the eas t-central Chinese coast but more typhoons hitting Guangdong. Spectral analy sis of the Guangdong time series reveals an approximately fifty-year cycle in typhoon landfall frequency. While the physical mechanism remains to be i dentified, it is tempting to relate this periodicity to the pentadecadal va riability identified in the North Pacific Index (NPI) time series.