Statistical reconstruction of daily temperature and sea level pressure in Europe for the severe winter 1788/89

Abstract

The winter 1788/89 was one of the coldest win quality to allow historians to better assess the environmental ters Europe had witnessed in the past 300 years. Fortunately, and social impacts of the harsh weather. for historical climatologists, this extreme event occurred at a time when many stations across Europe, both private and as part of coordinated networks, were making quantitative observations of the weather. This means that several dozen early instrumental series are available to carry out an in depth study of this severe cold spell. While there have been attempts to present daily spatial information for this winter, there is more to be done to understand the weather variabil ity and day-to-day processes that characterised this weather extreme. In this study, we seek to reconstruct daily spatial high-resolution temperature and sea level pressure fields of the winter 1788/89 in Europe from November through Febru ary. The reconstruction is performed with an analogue resam pling method (ARM) that uses both historical instrumental data and a weather type classification. Analogue reconstruc tions are then post-processed through an ensemble Kalman fitting (EnKF) technique. Validation experiments show good skill for both reconstructed variables, which manage to cap ture the dynamics of the extreme in relation to the large-scale circulation. These results are promising for more such stud ies to be undertaken, focusing on different extreme events and other regions in Europe and perhaps even further back in time. The dataset presented in this study may be of sufficien