Private diaries as information sources in climate research

Abstract

Private diaries constitute a unique set of materials within climate change research in that they provide information both on past climate variability and on the ways that people live within, and interact with, climate. The fact that the observations within diaries are affected as much by personal experience as by physical conditions can render the derivation of robust climatic data problematic, and a number of techniques have been developed to generate quantitative or semiquantitative information from them. These include frequency counts of binary meteorological phenomena such as days with/without precipitation, content analysis techniques, proxies such as grain harvest dates, and statistical techniques that assume of some degree of continuity between the reconstruction period and the present day. The latter approaches can provide the most robust data, but can preclude direct comparison between past and present climates. Some studies attempt to increase reliability through comparison with other contemporaneous reconstructions, but this can create a potential for circular reasoning. As ethnographies, the methodological issues are less challenging. Most were highly personal documents and not intended for publication; diaries can therefore represent 'pure' ethnographies, representing an unbiased account of individuals' interactions with the 'weather world' and, in some cases, the ways that weather informed the character they presented to the world. Diaries can therefore exemplify individuals' highly personal engagement with weather and climate, reflective of a myriad of a number of social, cultural, political, and scientific narratives. Their use in climate research can therefore provide important contributions to current debates.

Life in the weather-world: examining an eighteenth-century ‘ecological perspective’

“…Despite these problems, the level of detail and regularity in recording methods mean that the diaries compare favourably to other climate proxies, and they can be used to provide relatively high resolution insights across their limited time span (Brázdil et al 2005;Adamson 2015). Qualitative statements can be converted to figures for temperature and precipitation, and then compared to widely used instrumental series ( Figure 1; see Pillatt 2012c for a more detailed description of this method).…”

Dry weather fears of Britain’s early ‘industrial’ canal network

“…In exploring how the early canal network developed and its vulnerability to droughts, this paper also contributes to the growing literature exploring how past experiences can, and continue to, shape our understanding of contemporary climate (Adamson 2015;Adamson et al 2018;Mitchell 2011;Westermann and Rohr 2015) and hazard adaptation and resilience (Jones et al 2012;Sangster et al 2018).…”

The climate in south-east Moravia, Czech Republic, 1803–1830, based on daily weather records kept by the Reverend Šimon Hausner

“…Recent historical climatology uses a very broad range of documentary evidence, including information about weather and related phenomena, for reconstructions of past climate variability (Brázdil et al, 2005a(Brázdil et al, , 2010White et al, 2018). Among such sources, visual daily weather observations are of particular importance, often appearing in the form of weather diaries (for the use of private diaries, see the overview paper by Adamson, 2015). Weather diaries usually contain qualitative descriptions of daily weather and, at varying degrees of detail, they also describe certain meteorological, hydrological, and phenological events and their impacts.…”

“…Although weather diaries occur nearly all over the world (e.g. see Glaser et al, 1991;Druckenbrod et al, 2003;Hirano and Mikami, 2008;Mikami, 2008;Zhang et al, 2013;Adamson and Nash, 2014;Lorrey and Chappell, 2016), Europe is a particularly rich region for them, spanning a period of almost 8 centuries. The first known daily weather records, for 1269-1270, appeared in England among a volume of papers by Roger Bacon (Long, 1974), followed by observations made by the Reverend William Merle in Lincolnshire from the years 1337 to 1344 (Lawrence, 1972).…”