The weather behind words – new methodologies for integrated hydrometeorological reconstruction through documentary sources
<p>Historical climatology has remarkable potentialities to produce climatic reconstructions with high temporal resolution. However, some methodological limitations hinder the spatial development of this discipline. This study presents a new approach to historical climatology that overcomes som...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2019-07-01
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| Series: | Climate of the Past |
| Online Access: | https://www.clim-past.net/15/1303/2019/cp-15-1303-2019.pdf |
| Summary: | <p>Historical climatology has remarkable potentialities to
produce climatic reconstructions with high temporal resolution. However,
some methodological limitations hinder the spatial development of this
discipline. This study presents a new approach to historical climatology
that overcomes some of the limitations of classical approaches, such as the
rogation method or content analysis: the Cost Opportunity for Small Towns
(COST). It analyses historic documents and takes advantage of all sorts of
meteorological information available in written documents, and not only the
severest events, to therefore overcome the most prominent bottlenecks of
former approaches. COST relies on the fact that using paper is very costly,
so its use to describe meteorological conditions is hypothesised as being
proportional to the impact they had on society. To prove the validity of
this approach to reconstruct climate conditions, this article exemplarily
uses the Municipal Chapter Acts of a small town in southern Spain (Caravaca de
la Cruz), which span the 1600–1900 period, and allows reconstructions to be
obtained on a monthly basis. Using the same documentary source, the three
approaches were used to derive respective climate reconstructions, which
were then compared to assess climate signal consistency and to identify
possible caveats in the methods. The three approaches led to a generally
coherent series of secular variability in the hydrological conditions, which
agrees well with previous study results. The COST approach is arguably more
objective and less affected by changes in societal behaviour, which allows
it to perform comparative studies in regions with different languages and
traditions.</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1814-9324 1814-9332 |