The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent
Büntgen et al. (2015; hereinafter B15) present the result of new research which question the results of Wetter et al. 2014, ( hereinafter W14) and Wetter et al. (2013, hereinafter W13) regarding European climate in 1540. B15 conclude from tree-ring evidence that the results based on documentary data of W14 Bprobably overstated the intensity and duration of the 1540
Abstract. Narrative evidence contained within historical documents and inscriptions provides an important record of climate variability for periods prior to the onset of systematic meteorological data collection. A common approach used by historical climatologists to convert such qualitative information into continuous quantitative proxy data is through the generation of ordinal-scale climate indices. There is, however, considerable variability in the types of phenomena reconstructed using an index approach and the practice of index development in different parts of the world. This review, written by members of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) CRIAS working group – a collective of climate historians and historical climatologists researching Climate Reconstructions and Impacts from the Archives of Societies – provides the first global synthesis of the use of the index approach in climate reconstruction. We begin by summarising the range of studies that have used indices for climate reconstruction across six continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia) as well as the world's oceans. We then outline the different methods by which indices are developed in each of these regions, including a discussion of the processes adopted to verify and calibrate index series, and the measures used to express confidence and uncertainty. We conclude with a series of recommendations to guide the development of future index-based climate reconstructions to maximise their effectiveness for use by climate modellers and in multiproxy climate reconstructions.
Records of grape harvest dates (GHDs) are the oldest and the longest continuous phenological data in Europe. However, many available series, including the wellknown (Dijon) Burgundy series, are error prone because scholars so far have uncritically drawn the data from 19th century publications instead of going back to the archives. The GHDs from the famous vine region of Beaune (Burgundy) were entirely drawn from the archives and critically cross-checked with narrative evidence. In order to reconstruct temperature, the series was calibrated against the long Paris temperature series comprising the 360 years from 1659 to 2018. The 664-year-long Beaune series from 1354 to 2018 is also significantly correlated with tree-ring and documentary proxy evidence as well as with the central European temperature series (from 1500). The series is clearly subdivided into two parts. From 1354 to 1987 grapes were on average picked from 28 September on, whereby during the last 31-year-long period of rapid warming from 1988 to 2018 harvests began 13 d earlier. Early harvest dates are shown to be accompanied by high pressure over western-central Europe and atmospheric blocking over Denmark. The 33 extremely early harvests comprising the fifth percentile bracket of GHDs are unevenly distributed over time; 21 of them occurred between 1393 and 1719, while this is the case for just 5 years between 1720 and 2002. Since the hot summer of 2003, 8 out of 16 spring-summer periods were outstanding according to the statistics of the last 664 years, no less than 5 among them within the last 8 years. In the Paris temperature measurements since 1659, April-to-July temperature reached the highest value ever in 2018. In sum, the 664-year-long Beaune GHD series demonstrates that outstanding hot and dry years in the past were outliers, while they have become the norm since the transition to rapid warming in 1988.
Abstract. The cold/wet anomaly of the 1310s (“Dantean Anomaly”) has attracted a lot of attention from scholars, as it is commonly interpreted as a signal of the transition between the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). The huge variability that can be observed during this decade, like the high interannual variability observed in the 1340s, has been highlighted as a side effect of this rapid climatic transition. In this paper, we demonstrate that a multi-seasonal drought of almost 2 years occurred in the Mediterranean between 1302 and 1304, followed by a series of hot, dry summers north of the Alps from 1304 to 1306. We suggest that this outstanding dry anomaly, unique in the 13th and 14th centuries, together with cold anomalies of the 1310s and the 1340s, is part of the climatic shift from the MCA to the LIA. Our reconstruction of the predominant weather patterns of the first decade of the 14th century – based on both documentary and proxy data – identifies multiple European precipitation seesaw events between 1302 and 1307, with similarities to the seesaw conditions which prevailed over continental Europe in 2018. It can be debated to what extent the 1302–1307 period can be compared to what is currently discussed regarding the influence of the phenomenon of Arctic amplification on the increasing frequency of persistent stable weather patterns that have occurred since the late 1980s. Additionally, this paper deals with socioeconomic and cultural responses to drought risks in the Middle Ages as outlined in contemporary sources and provides evidence that there is a significant correlation between pronounced dry seasons and fires that devastated cities.
Résumé La date d’ouverture des bans de vendange est depuis longtemps considérée comme un indicateur de première importance pour l’histoire du climat. Les archives de la ville de Dijon possèdent la plus longue série de ce type connue à ce jour dans le monde, permettant de couvrir une période allant de 1385 à 1906 sans grandes lacunes. Très célèbre, l’établissement de cette série, effectué en grande partie par Jules Lavalle en 1855, repris par Alfred Angot qui l’augmenta de la fenêtre 1842-1879 n’avait pourtant jamais été révisé depuis, alors que les normes de critique du xix e siècle ne correspondent pas toujours aux exigences actuelles. Le nouveau travail de compilation proposé ici, selon des critères plus stricts, s’est achevé sur la mise en évidence de 132 divergences plus ou moins notables entre cette nouvelle et l’ancienne série. Nous nous sommes attachés également à caractériser les grandes respirations de l’histoire sociale, propres aux pratiques de la viticulture dijonnaise sur ce temps long. Sont apparues des vendanges sans doute ouvertes de manière artificiellement précoce jusqu’au milieu du xvi e siècle, des vendanges ouvertes à maturité générale entre xvii e et xviii e siècles, et un retour à des cueillettes à plus grande précocité après la Révolution. Les conclusions climatiques s’en trouvent affinées. En outre, le coefficient de corrélation moyen ( R = 0,630) entre les dates d’ouverture des vendanges à Dijon et les données thermométriques (avril à septembre) disponibles de 1676 à 1905 confirme la bonne fiabilité en ce sens de l’indicateur constitué par les bans.
Abstract. The cold/wet anomaly of the 1310s (Dantean anomaly) has attracted a lot of attention from scholars, as it is commonly interpreted as a signal of the transition between the MCA and the LIA. The huge variability that can be observed during this decade, similarly with the high interannual variability observed in the 1340s, has been highlighted as a side-effect of this rapid climatic transition. In this paper, we demonstrate that a multi-seasonal drought of almost two years occurred in the Mediterranean between 1302 and 1304, and respectively a series of hot and dry summers north of the Alps from 1304 to 1306. We propose to interpret this outstanding dry anomaly, unique in the 13th/14th century, combined with the 1310s and the 1340s cold anomalies, as part of the climatic shift from the MCA to the LIA. Our reconstruction of the predominant weather patterns of the first decade of the 14th century from documentary and proxy data lead to the identification of multiple European water seesaw events in 1302–1307, with similarities to the seesaw conditions which prevailed in 2018 over continental Europe. It can be debated to which extent the 1302–1307 period can be compared to what is currently discussed regarding the influence of the Arctic amplification phenomenon on the increasing frequency of long-lasting stable weather patterns that occurred since the late 1980s. Additionally, this paper deals with socio-economic and cultural responses to drought risks in the Middle Ages from contemporary sources and provides evidence that there is a significant correlation between blazes that devastated cities and pronounced dry seasons.
Abstract. Evidence contained within historical documents and inscriptions provides an important record of climate variability for periods prior to the onset of systematic meteorological data collection. A common approach used by historical climatologists to convert such qualitative documentary evidence into continuous quantitative proxy data is through the generation of ordinal-scale climate indices. There is, however, considerable variability in the types of phenomena reconstructed using an index approach and the practice of index development in different parts of the world. This review, written by members of the PAGES CRIAS Working Group – a collective of climate historians and historical climatologists researching Climate Reconstructions and Impacts from the Archives of Societies – provides the first global synthesis of the use of the index approach in climate reconstruction. We begin by summarising the range of studies that have used indices for climate reconstruction across six continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia) plus the world's oceans. We then outline the different methods by which indices are developed in each of these regions, including a discussion of the processes adopted to verify and calibrate index series, and the measures used to express confidence and uncertainty. We conclude with a series of recommendations to guide the development of future index-based climate reconstructions to maximise their effectiveness for use by climate modellers and in multiproxy climate reconstructions.
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