A collection of sub-daily pressure and temperature observations for the early instrumental period with a focus on the “year without a summer” 1816

Investor logo

Warning

This publication doesn't include Faculty of Economics and Administration. It includes Faculty of Science. Official publication website can be found on muni.cz.
Authors

BRUGNARA Y. AUCHMANN R. BRÖNNIMANN S. ALLAN R.J. AUER I. BARRIENDOS M. BERGSTRÖM H. BHEND J. BRÁZDIL Rudolf COMPO G.P. CORNES R.C. DOMINGUEZ-CASTRO F. VAN ENGELEN A.F.V. FILIPIAK J. HOLOPAINEN J. JOURDAIN S. KUNZ M. LUTERBACHER J. MAUGERI M. MERCALLI L. MOBERG A. MOCK C.J. PICHARD G. ŘEZNÍČKOVÁ Ladislava VAN DER SCHRIER G. SLONOSKY V. USTRNUL Z. VALENTE M.A. WYPYCH A. YIN X.

Year of publication 2015
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Climate of the Past
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-11-1027-2015
Field Atmosphere sciences, meteorology
Keywords 1816; year without a summer; air pressure; air temperature; Tambora
Description The eruption of Mount Tambora (Indonesia) in April 1815 is the largest documented volcanic eruption in history. It is associated with a large global cooling during the following year, felt particularly in parts of Europe and North America, where the year 1816 became known as the “year without a summer”. This paper describes an effort made to collect surface meteorological observations from the early instrumental period, with a focus on the years of and immediately following the eruption (1815–1817). Although the collection aimed in particular at pressure observations, correspondent temperature observations were also recovered. Some of the series had already been described in the literature, but a large part of the data, recently digitised from original weather diaries and contemporary magazines and newspapers, is presented here for the first time. The collection puts together more than 50 sub-daily series from land observatories in Europe and North America and from ships in the tropics. The pressure observations have been corrected for temperature and gravity and reduced to mean sea level. Moreover, an additional statistical correction was applied to také into account common error sources in mercury barometers. To assess the reliability of the corrected data set, the variance in the pressure observations is compared with modern climatologies, and single observations are used for synoptic analyses of three case studies in Europe. All raw observations will be made available to the scientific community in the International Surface Pressure Databank.
Related projects:

You are running an old browser version. We recommend updating your browser to its latest version.