Abstract. Climatic variations have impacted societies since the very
beginning of human history. In order to keep track of climatic changes over
time, humans have thus often closely monitored the weather and
natural phenomena influencing everyday life. Resulting documentary evidence
from archives of societies enables invaluable insights into the past climate
beyond the timescale of instrumental and early instrumental measurements.
This information complements other proxies from archives of nature, such as
tree rings in climate reconstructions, as documentary evidence often covers
seasons (e.g., winter) and regions (e.g., Africa, eastern Russia,
Siberia, China) that are not well covered with natural proxies. While a
mature body of research on detecting climate signals from historical
documents exists, the large majority of studies is confined to a local or
regional scale and thus lacks a global perspective. Moreover, many studies
from before the 1980s have not made the transition into the digital age and
hence are essentially forgotten. Here, I attempt to compile the first-ever
systematic global inventory of quantitative documentary evidence related to
climate extending back to the Late Medieval Period. It combines information
on past climate from all around the world, retrieved from many studies of
documentary (i.e., written) sources. Historical evidence ranges from personal
diaries, chronicles, and administrative and clerical documents to ship logbooks and
newspaper articles. They include records of many sorts, e.g., tithe
records, rogation ceremonies, extreme events like droughts and floods, and weather and phenological observations. The inventory, published as
an electronic Supplement, is comprised of detailed event chronologies, time
series, proxy indices, and calibrated reconstructions, with the majority of
the documentary records providing indications on past temperature and
precipitation anomalies. The overall focus is on document-based time series
with significant potential for climate reconstruction. For each of the
almost 700 records, extensive meta-information and directions to the data
(if available) are given. To highlight the potential of documentary data for
climate science, three case studies are presented and evaluated with
different global reanalysis products. This comprehensive inventory promotes the first ever global perspective on
quantitative documentary climate records and thus lays the foundation for
incorporating documentary evidence into climate reconstruction on a global
scale, complementing (early) instrumental measurements and natural
climate proxies.
