Baseline Methods for Reconstructing United States 19th Century Climatic Extremes from Historical Data

University South Carolina Research Foundation, Columbia SC

Investigators

Abstract

Baseline Methods for Reconstructing United States 19th Century Climatic Extremes from Historical Data The proposed research will provide a methodological baseline for reconstructing large-scale historical climatic extremes for North America and the adjacent oceans by integrating early instrumental and documentary climate data together. Daily nineteenth century air temperatures, precipitation frequencies, and precipitation magnitude will be corrected to make them directly comparable with data practices of the modern instrumental record. These methods, aided by calibration methods from modern hourly weather data, will be directly applicable to reconstructing the pre-modern climate for any year in the nineteenth century and enable the construction of daily weather maps. The methods will be specifically applied to weather data from November 1848-November 1849 at the national scale; and the winter of 1861-1862 and the warm-season of 1860 at subregional scales. Newly discovered historical data will be extracted from overland diaries, records from permanent settlements, and maritime archives. These climatic extremes provide ideal climatic contrasts for testing these methods for historical climate reconstruction. The project will also contribute valuable information as it concerns prominent climatic impacts on westward emigration, the myth of the desert, linkages to cholera, whaling activity in the Arctic, agricultural impacts on the Plains and American South, and unprecedented flooding and cold waves.