Abstract
This paper describes the methodology of an ongoing project of constructing an East Asian climate database REACHES based on Chinese historical documents. The record source is Compendium of Meteorological Records of China in the Last 3000 Years which collects meteorology and climate related records from mainly official and local chronicles along with a small number of other documents. We report the digitization of the records covering the period 1644–1795. An example of the original records is translated to illustrate the typical contents which contain time, location and type of events. Chinese historical times and location names are converted into Gregorian calendar and latitudes and longitudes. A hierarchical database system is developed that consists of the hierarchies of domains, main categories, subcategories, and further details. Historical events are then digitized and categorized into such a system. Code systems are developed at all levels such that the original descriptive entries are converted into digitized records suitable for treatment by computers. Statistics and characteristics of the digitized records in the database are described.
Highlights
Background & SummaryIt is well accepted that the climate of earth has been changing all the time, sometimes drastically and sometimes mildly, and could occur in rapid or slow pace throughout the earth history (e.g., Lamb, 1977)[1]
The earth climate is a highly complex, nonlinear system whose complete comprehension is still beyond the reach for climate scientists. Such a system is capable of becoming chaotic and unpredictable as exemplified by the aperiodic solution discussed by Lorentz (1967) who used the convective system equations developed by Saltzman (1962) to demonstrate brilliantly this nonlinear nature[2,3]. This means that the climate system can become chaotic and change drastically as time evolves with a given initial condition even without any external forcing[4,5,6]
This paper is to report our recent effort to construct a climate database based on historical documents of China in the past 3000 + years
Summary
It is well accepted that the climate of earth has been changing all the time, sometimes drastically and sometimes mildly, and could occur in rapid or slow pace throughout the earth history (e.g., Lamb, 1977)[1]. One way is to use these models to reproduce climates in the past that we know well, and compare the predictions and records This raises another question: do we have good climate data for such a comparison? PAGES2K Consortium has made an important work assembling 692 temperature-sensitive proxy records into an unified dataset for the reconstruction of global temperature anomalies in the Common Era[12] While these proxy data have provided for many useful studies, they often don’t have adequate resolution and/or areal coverage. This paper is to report our recent effort to construct a climate database based on historical documents of China in the past 3000 + years This data set will be called REACHES standing for Reconstructed East Asian Climate Historical Encoded Series. Some basic statistics and characteristics of the current dataset will be presented
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