Extreme rain event during November 1617: from the eastern Iberian Peninsula to Balearic Islands. Speleothem records and historical documents.

Under the current climate change situation, the Mediterranean region has been identified as one of the primary hot-spots, expecting not only to become warmer, but also drier during the twenty-first century. Changing conditions also include an increase in the frequency of intense torrential rainfall events, whose occurrence has already caused increasing flash flood events with catastrophic impacts and human casualties. The understanding of the past extreme events is challenging and useful to deal with the current situation.

During November 1617 an extreme rain event has been documented by previous studies in a large latitudinal region from southern France to eastern river basins of the Iberian Peninsula (Thorndycraft et al., 2006). Here we present new evidences of the large-scale impact of this extreme event based on a multi-proxy approach. On the one hand, the occurrence of this event is interpreted by means of a flood cave horizon detected in a speleothem from Mallorca (Balearic Islands). On the other hand, historical documents depict this event also in some localities of Pyrenees, enhancing its longitudinal occurrence.

Through the integration with previous climate, paleohydrological and qualitative hydrometeorological reconstructions, we try to understand the complex atmospheric mechanisms that caused this event during the Little Ice Age.