Analysis and Interpretation: Temperature and Precipitation Indices

Pfister, Christian; Camenisch, Chantal; Dobrovolný, Petr

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_11

Cited by 21 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…In this research field, creating indices already has a long tradition. Pfister et al (2018) proposed separate temperature and precipitation indices with a seven-degree scale (see Fig. 1).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a first step, the sources were searched for drought descriptions. In a second step, these drought descriptions underwent a qualitative analysis, which means the droughts were classified by comparison according to their intensity and duration (Pfister, 1999;Pfister et al, 2018;Glaser, 2013;Camenisch, 2015). To attribute an index value -2 to a drought, at least one and a half months of reduced precipitation had to have been described.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Droughts in Bern and in Rouen from the 14th to the beginning of the 18th century derived from documentary evidence

Camenisch¹,

Salvisberg²

2019

Preprint

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Abstract. Droughts derive from a deficit of precipitation and belong to the most dangerous natural hazards for human societies. Documentary data of the pre-modern and early modern times contain direct and indirect information on precipitation that allow the production of reconstructions with the methods of historical climatology. For this study, two drought indices have been created on the basis of documentary data produced in Bern, Switzerland (DIB) and in Rouen, France (DIR) for the period from 1315 to 1715. These two indices have been compared to a third supra-regional drought index for Switzerland (SDI), Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium synthesised from precipitation reconstruction based on historical climatology. The results of the study show that the documentary data from Bern mainly contain summer droughts, whereas the data from Rouen rather allow the reconstruction of spring droughts. The comparison of the three indices shows that the DIB and the DIR most probably do not contain all actual drought events, but they also detect droughts that do not appear in the SDI. This fact suggests that more documentary data from single places, such as historical city archives, should be examined in the future and added to larger reconstructions in order to obtain more complete drought reconstructions.

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“…In this research field, creating indices already has a long tradition. Pfister et al (2018) proposed separate temperature and precipitation indices with a seven-degree scale (see Fig. 1).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Droughts in Bern and in Rouen from the 14th to the beginning of the 18th century derived from documentary evidence

Camenisch¹,

Salvisberg²

2019

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Furthermore, the novelty of colonial environments made it difficult for observers to determine what was normal weather or climate or to identify reliable phenological markers of variability or extremes. Adding to their confusion, early European explorers and colonists of North America expected climates to align with latitudes, overlooking the differences between Europe's predominately maritime climates and North America's predominately continental ones (Kupperman, 1982;Rockman, 2010). This study aims to evaluate whether the advantages of these sources outweigh their potential drawbacks when it comes to reconstructing past weather and climate.…”

Section: The Documentary Recordmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although there are abundant personal and official records dating back to the colonial period, many of the them containing information on weather and climate, few researchers have used them to reconstruct the frequency or severity of historical droughts (Mock, 2012;. Archeologists have reviewed physical and written evidence for the impact of climate and extreme weather, including droughts, during the first century of European expeditions in several regional contexts, particularly the Chesapeake (Blanton, 2000(Blanton, , 2003(Blanton, , 2004Rockman, 2010), the southeastern US (Burnett and Murray, 1993), Florida (Paar, 2009;Blanton, 2013), andNew Mexico (van West et al, 2013). A few historians have begun to incorporate climatic perspectives into accounts of early North American exploration and colonies (Kupperman, 2007a;Grandjean, 2011;Wickman, 2015Wickman, , 2018, and a 2017 monograph has provided a comprehensive narrative of the role of regional climate differences and climatic variability in early Spanish, French, and English exploration and colonization of the present-day US and Canada (White, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of drought information in early North American colonial documentary records and a high-resolution tree-ring-based reconstruction

White¹

2019

Clim. Past

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Abstract. Historical documentary records contain valuable information on climate, weather, and their societal impacts during the pre-instrumental period, but it may be difficult to assess the objectivity and reliability of this information, particularly where the documentary record is incomplete or the reliability of the information it contains is uncertain. This article presents a comprehensive review of information relating to drought found in original written records concerning all early European expeditions (1510–1610 CE) into the present-day US and Canada, and compares this information with maps and time series of drought generated from the tree-ring-based North American Drought Atlas (NADA). The two sources mostly agree in the timing and location of droughts. This correspondence suggests that much of the information in these early colonial historical records is probably objective and reliable, and that tree-ring-based drought atlases can provide information relevant to local and regional human historical events, at least in locations where their reconstruction skill is particularly high. This review of drought information from written sources and tree-ring-based reconstructions also highlights the extraordinary challenges faced by early European explorers and colonists in North America due to climatic variability in an already unfamiliar and challenging environment.

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“…So-called "Pfister indices" (Pfister et al, 2018) are often used and categorize weather in three-point (-1, 0, 1) or seven-point (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3) indices, with corresponding designations such as "extremely cold", "cold", etc. (Pfister, 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthetic Weather Diaries: Concept and Application to Swiss Weather in 1816

Brönnimann

2020

Preprint

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Abstract. Climate science is about to produce numerical daily weather reconstructions based on meteorological measurements for Central Europe 250 years back. Using a pilot reconstruction covering Switzerland at 2 × 2 km2 resolution for 1816, this paper presents methods to translate numerical reconstructions and derived indices into text describing daily weather and the state of vegetation. This facilitates comparison with historical sources and analyses of effects of weather on different aspects of life. The translation, termed synthetic weather diary could possibly be used to train machine learning approaches to do the reverse: reconstruct past weather from categorized text entries in diaries.

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Analysis and Interpretation: Temperature and Precipitation Indices

Cited by 21 publications

References 19 publications

Droughts in Bern and in Rouen from the 14th to the beginning of the 18th century derived from documentary evidence

Droughts in Bern and in Rouen from the 14th to the beginning of the 18th century derived from documentary evidence

A comparison of drought information in early North American colonial documentary records and a high-resolution tree-ring-based reconstruction

Synthetic Weather Diaries: Concept and Application to Swiss Weather in 1816

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