European climate of the past 500 years: new challenges for historical climatology

Abstract

Temperature reconstructions from Europe for the past 500 years based on documentary and instrumental data are analysed. First, the basic documentary data sources, including information about climate and weather-related extremes, are described. Then, the standard palaeoclimatological reconstruction method adopted here is discussed with a particular application to temperature reconstructions from documentary-based proxy data. The focus is on two new reconstructions; JanuaryApril mean temperatures for Stockholm , based on a combination of data for the sailing season in the Stockholm harbour and instrumental temperature measurements, and monthly Central European temperature (CEuT) series (1500-2007) based on documentary-derived temperature indices of the Czech Republic, Germany and Switzerland combined with instrumental records from the same countries. The two series, both of which are individually discussed in greater detail R. Brázdil (B) · P. Dobrovolný in subsequent papers in this special edition, are here compared and analysed using running correlations and wavelet analysis. While the Stockholm series shows a pronounced low-frequency component, the CEuT series indicates much weaker lowfrequency variations. Both series are analysed with respect to three different longperiod reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and are compared with other European temperature reconstructions based on tree-rings, wine-harvest data and various climate multiproxies. Correlation coefficients between individual proxy-based series show weaker correlations compared to the instrumental data. There are also indications of temporally varying temperature cross-correlations between different areas of Europe. The two temperature reconstructions have also been compared to geographically corresponding temperature output from simulations with global and regional climate models for the past few centuries. The findings are twofold: on the one hand, the analysis reinforces the hypothesis that the indexdata based CEuT reconstruction may not appropriately reflect the centennial scale variations. On the other hand, it is possible that climate models may underestimate regional decadal variability. By way of a conclusion, the results are discussed from a broader point of view and attention is drawn to some new challenges for future investigations in the historical climatology in Europe.

A 305-year continuous monthly rainfall series for the Island of Ireland (1711–2016)

“…The Neve diary contains estimates of rainfall totals from Derry taken from a rudimentary gauge 30 (described by Dixon (1959) system, similar to Brázdil et al (2010), to both diaries. Scores ranging from 1 (exceptionally dry) to 9 (exceptionally wet) were used to rank individual months and aligned with seasonal summaries.…”

Climatic effects and impacts of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Czech Lands

“…It occurs in a number of data sources (e.g. annals, chronicles, memoirs, diaries, newspapers, financial records, songs, letters, epigraphic records, and others), which provide the basis for research in historical climatology (Brázdil et al, 2005b(Brázdil et al, , 2010b iii. The detailed weather records kept by Anton Lehmann, a teacher in Noviny pod Ralskem, over the 1756-1818 period, which were copied into the local "book of memory" by Joseph Meissner in 1842 (S6) iv.…”

Documentary sources to investigate multidecadal variability of droughts

“…The spatial scale goes from a village to an entire empire. The climate is not an important topic in chronicles, so the climatic events documented in chronicles are mainly extreme events that represented a high impact on those societies; observed departures of plant-phenological phases, or other features of seasonality such as snow or ice from those in "ordinary years" (Brázdil et al, 2010).…”