Abstract
Abstract. The climate of the early nineteenth century is likely to have been significantly cooler than that of today, as it was a period of low solar activity (the Dalton minimum) and followed a series of large volcanic eruptions. Proxy reconstructions of the temperature of the period do not agree well on the size of the temperature change, so other observational records from the period are particularly valuable. Weather observations have been extracted from the reports of the noted whaling captain William Scoresby Jr., and from the records of a series of Royal Navy expeditions to the Arctic, preserved in the UK National Archives. They demonstrate that marine climate in 1810–1825 was marked by consistently cold summers, with abundant sea-ice. But although the period was significantly colder than the modern average, there was considerable variability: in the Greenland Sea the summers following the Tambora eruption (1816 and 1817) were noticeably warmer, and had less sea-ice coverage, than the years immediately preceding them; and the sea-ice coverage in Lancaster Sound in 1819 and 1820 was low even by modern standards.
Highlights
Instrumental records that adequately reflect large-scale climate change go back only to about 1850 (Brohan et al, 2006; Allan and Ansell, 2006) when the first national meteorological services were founded and systematic data collection began
Brohan for earlier periods we are mostly reliant on reconstructions from proxy observations (e.g. Jones et al, 2009) and noninstrumental observations (e.g. Wheeler et al, 2006). These reconstructions have large uncertainties, and the uncertainties are large for the climate of the early 19th century (Jansen et al, 2007): when a combination of low solar activity and a series of large volcanic eruptions produced a cool period – but it is not known either how much the global mean temperature fell or how the climate changes varied around the world
Quantifying the climate change of the early nineteenth century would be of value for climate model development and validation (Wagner and Zorita, 2005), and would help constrain proxy reconstructions of longer-term climate change
Summary
Quantifying the climate change of the early nineteenth century would be of value for climate model development and validation (Wagner and Zorita, 2005), and would help constrain proxy reconstructions of longer-term climate change. The red points are the observations, the black and and 1825, and covering the Far North Atlantic and Cana- grey lines are the mean, max and min values from modern datasets dian Arctic (Fig. 3) Some of these logbook records have (monthly averages interpolated to daily, 1979–2004; AT from Rigor been previously recognised as a valuable source of climate et al, 2000, sea-ice from Rayner et al, 2003). The red points are the expedition’s observations, the black and grey lines are the mean, max and min values from modern datasets (monthly averages interpolated to daily, 1979–2004; sea-ice from Rayner et al, 2003, AT from Rigor et al, 2000, and pressure from Allan and Ansell, 2006). The expeditions were furnished with the best instruments of the time, and measurement errors are expected to be small (Ward and Dowdeswell, 2006), but changes in observing practices can be expected to produce some changes
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