Abstract. This paper studies the winter temperatures of the second part of the sixteenth century in the central area of the Iberian Peninsula. A large number of historical documents that are stored in many different Spanish archives were consulted in order to carry out this research. The data was first arranged and weighted according to the intensity and significance of the meteorological phenomena described and, subsequently, these values were assigned an ordinal index ranging from +4 to −4. The statistical treatment applied is based on the reconstruction of temperatures equivalent to this ordinal index, expressed as anomalies of the 1961–1990 period, belonging to a reference station located at the approximate geographical center of the area under study. The results show winter thermal conditions different from current ones that, for the most part, stay below the reference average and that occurred with a wide range of variability. The influence that thermal conditions had on the evolution of some environmental aspects are considered based on the forest exploitation problem information and on the wine harvest production.

Abstract. This study presents the results of a historic reconstruction based upon documentary sources of precipitation and floods during the last fifty years of the 16th century in Central Spain. We used data from primary sources contemporary to the events rather than compilations or secondary references. These documents belong to the institutions that administered the study area during the time period of interest and consist of municipal or monastic minute books and administrative texts from properties belonging to the nobility and royal family. Direct data that explicitly describe meteorological or flood-related events are haphazardly distributed throughout personal correspondence and various reports, and the sizes of floods or precipitation events can also be deduced from indirect data. We analysed the qualitative data by transforming them into numerical indices of intensity/duration for precipitation and intensity/area for floods. We differentiated three sets of years that presented different hydrological patterns. The first period, from 1554 to 1575, exhibited regular precipitation patterns associated with low-intensity floods. The second, from 1576 to 1584, was characterised by low precipitation levels and few floods. The third, from 1585 to 1599, showed intense precipitation with large floods interspersed with long-lasting droughts. We interpret these results in the context of the environmental and land-use patterns of the time period studied, which coincided with a period of low temperatures.

Documentary climate data describe evidence of past climate arising from predominantly written historical documents such as diaries, chronicles, newspapers, or logbooks. Over the past decades, historians and climatologists have generated numerous document-based time series of local and regional climates. However, a global dataset of documentary climate time series has never been compiled, and documentary data are rarely used in large-scale climate reconstructions. Here, we present the first global multi-variable collection of documentary climate records. The dataset DOCU-CLIM comprises 621 time series (both published and hitherto unpublished) providing information on historical variations in temperature, precipitation, and wind regime. The series are evaluated by formulating proxy forward models (i.e., predicting the documentary observations from climate fields) in an overlapping period. Results show strong correlations, particularly for the temperature-sensitive series. Correlations are somewhat lower for precipitation-sensitive series. Overall, we ascribe considerable potential to documentary records as climate data, especially in regions and seasons not well represented by early instrumental data and palaeoclimate proxies.

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