Abstract
Although collaborative efforts have been made to retrieve climate data from instrumental observations and paleoclimate records, there is still a large amount of valuable information in historical archives that has not been utilized for climate reconstruction. Due to the qualitative nature of these datasets, historical texts have been compiled and studied by historians aiming to describe the climate impact in socio-economical aspects of human societies, but the inclusion of this information in past climate reconstructions remains fairly unexplored. Within this context, we present a novel approach to assimilate climate information contained in chronicles and annals from the 15th century to generate robust temperature and precipitation reconstructions of the Burgundian Low Countries, taking into account uncertainties associated with the descriptions of narrative sources. After data assimilation, our reconstructions present a high seasonal temperature correlation of ∼0.8 independently of the climate model employed to estimate the background state of the atmosphere. Our study aims to be a first step towards a more quantitative use of available information contained in historical texts, showing how Bayesian inference can help the climate community with this endeavour.
Highlights
Historical texts, both descriptive sources, such as chronicles, and written records of phenology, such as grape harvest dates, 15 have enabled high-resolution reconstructions of temperature and precipitation for periods prior to the modern instrumental record (White et al, 2018)
We present a novel approach to assimilate climate information contained in chronicles and annals from the 15th century to generate robust temperature and precipitation reconstructions of the Burgundian Low Countries, taking into account uncertainties associated with the descriptions of narrative sources
This indicates that the information contained in historical archives can be efficiently transferred into climate reconstructions, yielding consistent results from different prior states
Summary
Historical texts, both descriptive sources, such as chronicles, and written records of phenology, such as grape harvest dates, 15 have enabled high-resolution reconstructions of temperature and precipitation for periods prior to the modern instrumental record (White et al, 2018). The principal approach for these reconstructions has been the “index” method (Pfister et al, 2018; Nash et al, 2021). Historical climatologists working with these texts have converted their information into ordinal indices (typically -3 to +3), which approximate departures from average monthly or seasonal conditions, and they have calibrated these indices to early instrumental data to obtain reconstructed values for the pre-instrumental period. The resulting temperature 20 and precipitation reconstructions have demonstrated high reconstruction skill, especially at the decadal scale. Discussion started: 3 December 2021 c Author(s) 2021.
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