DOCU-CLIM: A global documentary climate dataset for climate reconstructions

Abstract

Documentary climate data describe evidence of past climate arising from predominantly written historical documents such as diaries, chronicles, newspapers, or logbooks. Over the past decades, historians and climatologists have generated numerous document-based time series of local and regional climates. However, a global dataset of documentary climate time series has never been compiled, and documentary data are rarely used in large-scale climate reconstructions. Here, we present the first global multi-variable collection of documentary climate records. The dataset DOCU-CLIM comprises 621 time series (both published and hitherto unpublished) providing information on historical variations in temperature, precipitation, and wind regime. The series are evaluated by formulating proxy forward models (i.e., predicting the documentary observations from climate fields) in an overlapping period. Results show strong correlations, particularly for the temperature-sensitive series. Correlations are somewhat lower for precipitation-sensitive series. Overall, we ascribe considerable potential to documentary records as climate data, especially in regions and seasons not well represented by early instrumental data and palaeoclimate proxies.

South African extreme weather during the 1877–1878 El Niño

“…In addition, we use land‐based measurements from Cape Town (Royal Astronomical Observatory; Picas et al ., 2019; Ndebele et al ., 2020), Pietermaritzburg (Fort Napier; Allan et al ., 2011), Port Elizabeth (Peterson and Vose, 1997) and Ribe (Kenya; Allan et al ., 2011), as well as documentary records. The documentary records are extracted from the most comprehensive global collection available to date (Burgdorf, 2022; Burgdorf et al ., 2022, 2023); for Africa, most of the records are semi‐quantitative combinations of proxy and rain gauge data described in Nicholson et al . (2012).…”

“…In addition, we use land-based measurements from Cape Town (Royal Astronomical Observatory; Picas et al, 2019;Ndebele et al, 2020), Pietermaritzburg (Fort Napier; Allan et al, 2011), Port Elizabeth (Peterson and Vose, 1997) and Ribe (Kenya; Allan et al, 2011), as well as documentary records. The documentary records are extracted from the most comprehensive global collection available to date (Burgdorf, 2022;Burgdorf et al, 2022Burgdorf et al, , 2023; for Africa, most of the records are semi-quantitative combinations of proxy and rain gauge data described in Nicholson et al (2012). We also analyse precipitation data from a monthly gridded reconstruction based on an offline data assimilation technique (EKF400v2; Valler et al, 2022), from the Twentieth Century Reanalysis version 3 (20CRv3; Slivinski et al, 2019) and from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project Climate Data Record version 2.3 (GPCP; Adler et al, 2016).…”

Perspective and review: how to develop our understanding of temporal changes in the relationship between people and the landscape under societal and climate change in Northeast Asia?

“…With the text mining of historical documents and data approach, we search for records and numerical data that apply to each component layer of the landscape in old handwritten or printed documents, books, and statistics and then extract useful information by analyzing the spatio-temporal variability of the records (Burgdorf et al, 2023). Historical documents and data are part of the so-called "historical dark data" (Easterday et al, 2018;Kelly et al, 2022).…”

“…For example, in Japan, we can access digitized historical documents and converted PDF files of old books, old diaries, field notes, and statistics on the Web sites of museums, universities, research institutes, and the National Diet Library (e.g., Japan Search: https://jpsearch.go.jp/; Digital collection of the National Diet Library: https://dl.ndl.go.jp/en/; video and sound materials at the National Ethnology Museum: https://htq.minpaku.ac.jp/menu/ database_eng.html; the record of field work conducted in Africa, Middle East, Asia, and Oceania during the 1960s and 2010s by a team from Kyoto University in Japan: https://fieldnote.archiving.jp/, Yamada, 2015;Shin et al, 2023a). In previous studies, the paleoclimate before the advent of historical metrological observations was estimated by text mining of records related to flowering phenology of cherry (Aono and Kazui, 2008;Aono, 2015;Shin et al, 2022c), and herbaceous peony and rabbit-ear iris (Aono and Nishitani, 2022), harvest (Garnier et al, 2011;Kiss et al, 2011;Možný et al, 2012), weather, and disasters (Zaiki and Mikami, 2013;Zaiki et al, 2014;Hirano et al, 2018;Chen et al, 2020;Burgdorf et al, 2023). However, historical documents and data also include various kinds of records such as land cover and land use, forests, fisheries, agriculture, livestock farming, business transactions, tax payments, and economic policy (Büntgen et al, 2012;Daux et al, 2012;Brázdil et al, 2016;.…”

Weather, Vol. 78, no. 10, October 2023, pp. 270‐300

“…In addition, we use land-based measurements from Cape Town (Royal Astronomical Observatory; Picas et al, 2019;Ndebele et al, 2020), Pietermaritzburg (Fort Napier; Allan et al, 2011), Port Elizabeth (Peterson and Vose, 1997) and Ribe (Kenya; Allan et al, 2011), as well as documentary records. The documentary records are extracted from the most comprehensive global collection available to date (Burgdorf, 2022;Burgdorf et al, 2022Burgdorf et al, , 2023; for Africa, most of the records are semi-quantitative combinations of proxy and rain gauge data described in Nicholson et al (2012). We also analyse precipitation data from a monthly gridded reconstruction based on an offline data assimilation technique (EKF400v2; Valler et al, 2022), from the Twentieth Century Reanalysis version 3 (20CRv3; Slivinski et al, 2019) and from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project Climate Data Record version 2.3 (GPCP; Adler et al, 2016).…”