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Environmental Sciences: A Students Companion

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The Holocene
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Climatic reconstructions for the northeast Atlantic region AD 1685-1700: a new source of evidence from naval logbooks

Dennis Wheeler

School of Health, Natural and Social Sciences, University of Sunderland, Sunderland SRI 3PZ, UK denniswheeler{at}beeb.net

Jose Suarez-Dominguez

School of Health, Natural and Social Sciences, University of Sunderland, Sunderland SRI 3PZ, UK

This paper draws on a newly developed source of data in the form of ships' logbooks to cast a detailed light on the weather and climate of a critical period in recent climatic history: the decades of the 1680s and 1690s, possibly the coldest of the last 1000 years. Logbooks of the period provide daily data for wind force, direction, precipitation and general weather conditions. These were abstracted and aggregated into monthly statistics. These data indicate the highly episodic character of air flow patterns at this time, with marked changes of phase between high and low zonality in the westerlies. The data also provide evidence of the stormy character of the period, particularly with respect to summer conditions. Comparisons are made with contemporary and independently derived instrumental and proxy series. The data source is confirmed as providing a valuable addition to climatic sources, and is additionally important because it is based on regular daily observations and made at sea-an area very poorly represented for this time period.

Key Words: Ships' logbooks • ‘Little Ice Age’ • Maunder Minimum • palaeoclimatology • climatic reconstructions • northeastern Atlantic

The Holocene, Vol. 16, No. 1, 39-49 (2006)
DOI: 10.1191/0959683606hl894ra
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