A thousand‐year record of temperature variations for Germany and Central Europe based on documentary data

Abstract

This paper presents a temperature reconstruction of the past 1000 years for Central Europe, based on chronological records. The advantages and limitations of this hermeneutic, text-based approach are discussed and the statistic methodology is introduced. Historical documents represent direct observation of weather and atmospheric conditions with highest temporal resolution available and precise dating. A major advantage of these extensive data is that they allow the reconstruction of large numbers of variables such as winter temperature, precipitation, pressure patterns or climate extremes as well as floods or storms. Within this hermeneutic climatological research approach, even human impacts and social dimensions of climate development can be examined. In order to quantify the historical information, statistical methods are applied, based on an index approach. ResultsResults are obtained both concerning methodological aspects and those referring to temperature development since AD

The Historical Time Frame (Past 1000 Years)

“…Several recent multi-proxy reconstructions were made for the northern hemisphere (Jones et al 1998(Jones et al , 2001a(Jones et al , b, 2009Mann et al 1998Mann et al , 1999Mann et al , 2008Bertrand et al 2002;Mann and Jones 2003;Jones and Mann 2004;Moberg et al 2005;Ljungqvist 2010;Ljungqvist et al 2012). On a regional scale, the most important reconstructions based on tree-ring or multi-proxy data are for Fennoscandia (Briffa et al 1992;Gouirand et al 2008;Lindholm et al 2009Lindholm et al , 2011Esper et al 2012), Finland (Helama et al 2002(Helama et al , 2005(Helama et al , 2009bOgurtsov et al 2008;Luoto and Helama 2010), central and northern Sweden (Gunnarson and Linderholm 2002;Linderholm and Gunnarson 2005;Moberg et al 2006;Grudd 2008), eastern Norway (Kalela-Brundin 1999, Germany (Glaser 2008;Glaser and Riemann 2009), the north-western Baltic Sea (Klimanov et al 1985), Russia (Klimenko and Solomina 2010), and Poland (Przybylak et al 2005Przybylak 2007Przybylak , 2011SzychowskaKrąpiec 2010;Koprowski et al 2012). Although many of the data sets concern the Alps (Büntgen et al 2005…”

To what extent do water isotope records from low accumulation Alpine ice cores reproduce instrumental temperature series?

“…Here, the worldwide densest network of long-term instrumental climate observations exists (Auer et al, 2007;Bo¨hm et al, 2010) which has already been extended backwards by various climate records. This concerns, among others, tree ring indices (Bu¨entgen et al, 2006;Frank et al, 2007), historical evidences (Brazdil et al, 2005;Glaser and Riemann, 2009), speleothems (Spo¨tl et al, 2004), lake sediments (von Grafenstein et al, 1999;Blass et al, 2007;Ilyashuk et al, 2011) and glacier lengths (Joerin, et al, 2008;Zemp et al, 2008). However, deploying isotope records from Alpine ice cores beyond the instrumental era is hampered by the small spatial extension of suitable cold drilling sites.…”

Spatial and temporal scales of atmospheric dynamics

“…This is not really surprising, as it is known that the winter standard deviations are generally larger than the summer ones (e.g. Glaser and Riemann [2009]; Jones et al [2014]). …”