Publication: The weather behind words – new methodologies for integrated hydrometeorological reconstruction through documentary sources
Authors
Gil Guirado, Salvador ; Gómez Navarro, Juan José ; Montávez, Juan Pedro
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Publisher
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-1303-2019
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
©2019. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This document is the Published version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Climate of the Past. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-1303-2019
Abstract
Historical climatology has remarkable potentiali ties to produce climatic reconstructions with high temporal
resolution. However, some methodological limitations hin der the spatial development of this discipline. This study
presents a new approach to historical climatology that over comes some of the limitations of classical approaches, such
as the rogation method or content analysis: the Cost Oppor tunity for Small Towns (COST). It analyses historic docu ments and takes advantage of all sorts of meteorological in formation available in written documents, and not only the
severest events, to therefore overcome the most prominent
bottlenecks of former approaches. COST relies on the fact
that using paper is very costly, so its use to describe meteo rological conditions is hypothesised as being proportional to
the impact they had on society. To prove the validity of this
approach to reconstruct climate conditions, this article exem plarily uses the Municipal Chapter Acts of a small town in
southern Spain (Caravaca de la Cruz), which span the 1600–
1900 period, and allows reconstructions to be obtained on a
monthly basis. Using the same documentary source, the three
approaches were used to derive respective climate recon structions, which were then compared to assess climate sig nal consistency and to identify possible caveats in the meth ods. The three approaches led to a generally coherent series
of secular variability in the hydrological conditions, which
agrees well with previous study results. The COST approach
is arguably more objective and less affected by changes in
societal behaviour, which allows it to perform comparative
studies in regions with different languages and traditions
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Citation
Climate of the Past, 15, 1303–1325, 2019
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