The ‘Great Snow’ of winter 1614/1615 in England

Abstract

© 2018 The Authors Weather published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Meteorological Society In this paper we explore the ‘Great Snow’ of 1614/1615 in England. By combining entries in parish registers with other archival documents and literary sources, we can begin to build a detailed picture of this extreme weather event and its temporal and geographical extent, societal impacts, and subsequent inscription into the cultural memory. Certainly one of the heaviest and prolonged snowfalls in England's weather history, in some places the freeze was followed by flooding and then drought, and the combination of successive extremes rendered 1615 a particularly memorable weather year

Precipitation reconstructions for Paris based on the observations by Louis Morin, 1665–1713 CE

“…Second, we examine seasonal variability. To do this, we have plotted the precipitation totals for each season in (Manley, 1969;Veale et al, 2018): Gordon Manley described the winter of 1695 as "notably snowy", which is consistent with Morin's records. Further, Manley writes that snow has covered the lower ground around London on a number of days in May 1698; 13 May 1698 was probably the latest in spring.…”

Weird weather in Bristol during the Grindelwald Fluctuation (1560–1630)

“…His work suggests that the Grindelwald Fluctuation not only led to a general cooling, it was also associated with increased storminess and more unsettled weather. Meanwhile, a recent article on the ‘Great Snow’ of 1614/1615 (Veale et al ., 2018) has shown that a multi‐source approach can be used to build up a sophisticated picture of the nature, location and impact of exceptional weather events during the early seventeenth century.…”