Session Details

Historical documentary evidence, including personal journals, fiscal and judicial documents, administrative reports, commercial records, maps and ships logs, represent one of the major sources of high temporal resolution information for the investigation of climate during the pre-instrumental period. Historical sources incorporate early instrumental data, but also include references to frost dates, droughts, famines, the duration of snow and sea-ice cover, and phenological phenomena that can be used to semi-quantitatively reconstruct past climate. Such information can be used to extend instrumental records, corroborate evidence from natural archives such as tree rings, ice cores and coral reefs, and explore how different sectors of society were affected by (and responded to) periods of unusual climate and extreme events. Documentary evidence is generally limited to regions with long written traditions, particularly Europe and eastern Asia, but has been used more recently to reconstruct climate histories in various regions of Africa, the Americas and Australasia.
In order to improve climate reconstructions, extend records back in time and understand the implications of climate variability, the spatio-temporal coverage of high quality documentary evidence needs to be improved. There are methodological issues, such as calibration and observer-dependent bias, which also need to be addressed. The aim of this session is to bring together historical climatologists working with documentary sources to present the results of research at the forefront of climate reconstruction and impact studies, to exchange ideas on the methods and sources used in historical climatology, and in so doing to consider improvements in methodologies for the analysis of historical texts. The session is timely given the significance of research undertaken at the University of Bern to our understanding of historical climate.

The session invites papers and posters related to:

• historical documentary sources and their potential for climate reconstructions over timescales from the medieval period to the 19th century;
• local, regional and continental climate reconstruction using historical documents;
• climate reconstruction combining instrumental, documentary and natural proxies;
• comparison of document-derived climate reconstructions with model simulations;
• reconstructions of the environmental impacts and societal repercussions of historical climate variability;
• methodological issues in the analysis of documentary sources for climate reconstruction and impact analysis.