Climate change and disaster response - Case study of historical locust plagues of Shaanxi in central China

Based on collection and interpretation of Chinese historical documents, this paper gained the spatio-temporal distribution features of locust plagues of Shaanxi in central China. Locust plagues here occurred mainly in summer half-year (from April to September), with the maximum of occurring frequency in July and August. Both drought and locust plague records have little correlation with the regional area. With the focus on the relationship between locust plagues and climate change, this paper demonstrated that locust plague records could well meet the limitation of drought records for climate reconstruction and locust plagues had a well negative correlation with summer half-year precipitation instead of a positive correlation with winter half-year temperature. D and L were both important proxies to reflect the dry/wet climate change in central China. D was a direct and evident proxy while L was a complementary and latent proxy. Consequently, an integrated aridity index [D boolean OR L](10) was established to reconstruct 10-year resolution summer half-year aridity reconstruction value in Shaanxi from 1501 to 1950. The whole reasoning process was greatly dependent on statistic analysis, biological and ecological explanation, and regional comparison, all of which helped to prove the final results to be logical and credible. At last, the application future was also discussed.