Testing the credibility of historical newspaper reporting of extreme climate and weather events

Abstract

In recent years, newspaper research has been streamlined by digitisation and online hosting by PapersPast. This paper tests the reliability and credibility of reporting of extreme weather and climatic events through PapersPast to determine if newspaper research of past climate can be further streamlined. Searches were conducted through four early-20th-century Auckland newspapers, where counts of articles returned by key-word searches for particular periods were compared against periods of known extremes. We find that blind searches have only limited potential in identifying extreme weather and climatic events and that they are no substitute for thorough analyses of documentary sources.

Documentary data and the study of the past droughts: an overview of the state of the art worldwide

“…However, a range of other types of information may also appear in newspapers and journals. The validity and importance of such sources for use in historical-climatological studies have been pointed out in many papers (e.g., Gallego et al, 2008;Munro and Fowler, 2014;Nash et al, 2016b;Noone et al, 2017). For example, the 10th volume of Theatrum Europaeum (a printed work by Matthäus Merian related to the history of German-speaking countries, published in 21 volumes between 1633 and 1738) reported that during the hot summer of 1666, meadows and streams in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary dried up, people had to go 6-7 miles [c. 45-53 km] for water, and fires broke out in villages and forests.…”

Enriching the historical meteorological information using Romanian language newspaper reports: A database from 1880 to 1900

“…The quality control has been performed manually by double-checking all the entries, and a consistent data set has been collected and submitted to the validation procedure. While concerns about the credibility of the newspaper information can be always raised, validation can be approached either (a) by checking the records from the closest meteorological stations whenever available (e.g., Munro and Fowler, 2014) or (b) by inter-comparing the newspaper reports from different non-meteorological sources. In this study, the validation consisted in checking the consistency of the newspaper reports with meteorological observations from weather stations data published in Analele Institutului Meteorologic al României (Annals of the Romanian Meteorological Institute) (Hepites, 1885(Hepites, -1900 and Jahrbücher der Köningl.…”

Documentary data and the study of past droughts: a global state of the art

“…Using Czech documentary evidence, Munzar (2004) examined five extreme droughts in the Czech Lands and neighbouring countries that occurred in 1540, 1590, 1616, 1790 and 1842. The extreme drought of 1616 in the Czech Lands and some surrounding countries was again reported by Munzar and Ondráček (2016).…”