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Protracted droughts lasting years to decades constitute severe threats to human welfare across the Indian subcontinent. Such events are, however, rare during the instrumental period. since 1871 CE). In contrast, the historic documentary evidence indicates the repeated occurrences of protracted droughts in the region during the preinstrumental period implying that either the instrumental observations underestimate the full spectrum of monsoon variability or the historic accounts overestimate the severity and duration of the past droughts. Here we present a temporally precise speleothem-based oxygen isotope reconstruction of the Indian summer monsoon precipitation variability from Mawmluh cave located in northeast India. Our data reveal that protracted droughts, embedded within multidecadal intervals of reduced monsoon rainfall, frequently occurred over the past millennium. These extreme events are in striking temporal synchrony with the historically documented droughts, famines, mass mortality events, and geopolitical changes in the Indian subcontinent. Our findings necessitate reconsideration of the region’s current water resources, sustainability, and mitigation policies that discount the possibility of protracted droughts in the future. 

Although extended or ‘protracted’ El Niño and La Niña episodes were first suggested nearly 20 years ago, they have not received the attention of other ‘flavours’ of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) or low-frequency ‘ENSO-like’ phenomena. In this study, instrumental variables and palaeoclimatic reconstructions are used to investigate the most recent ‘protracted’ El Niño episode in 2014–2016, and place it into a longer historical context. Although just reaching the threshold for such an episode, the 2014–2016 ‘protracted’ El Niño had very severe societal, agricultural, environmental and ecological impacts, particularly in western Pacific regions like eastern Australia. We show that although ‘protracted’ ENSO episodes of either phase cause similar, near-global modulations of weather and climate as during more ‘classical’ events, impacts associated with ‘protracted’ episodes last longer, with strong influences in eastern Australia. The latter is a response to the dominance of Niño 4 sea surface temperature (SST) and associated atmospheric teleconnection anomalies during ‘protracted’ ENSO episodes. Importantly, while Niño 4 SST anomalies recorded during the austral summer of 2016 were the highest values on record, an analysis of long-term palaeoclimate records indicates that there may have been episodes of greater magnitude and duration than seen in instrumental observations. This suggests that shorter instrumental observations may underestimate the risks of possible future ENSO extremes compared with those observed from multi-century palaeoclimate records. Improved knowledge of ENSO and the potential to forecast ‘protracted’ episodes would be of immense practical benefit to communities affected by the severe impacts of ENSO extremes.