Drought reconstruction for the mid-latitude East Asia over the past half millennium

Here, we compiled a tree-ring network of 364 chronologies in Midlatitude East Asia and reconstructed the variation of the averaged May-August Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) at a spatial resolution of 0.5°×0.5°, for the period 1501-2000 CE. The reconstruction captured the spatial and temporal variation of actual drought well and also has a strong association with a drought atlas that was derived from historical documents.