Enriching the historical meteorological information using Romanian language newspaper reports: A database from 1880 to 1900
Abstract
Data recovery and climate reconstruction are an important support for climatechange research, as they provide information from periods and areas withsparse meteorological networks. Various sources are currently in use forobtaining valuable evidence of past climate, such as ship logs, diaries, books,monastery documents.
This study exploits newspaper reports in order to enrichthe historical meteorological information over the territory of Romania, fromthe last two decades of the 19thcentury. At that time, the area belonged to theAustro-Hungarian Empire and Kingdom of Romania, and the meteorologicalservices from Budapest (since 1870) and Bucharest (since 1884) were the pro-viders of official meteorological information.
The digital archive of three news-papers (România Libera, Gazeta de TransilvaniaandFoaia Poporului) wasinvestigated and the meteorological information was extracted and aggregatedinto a database containing 2,132 unique entries clearly referenced in time andspace. Each entry represents a meteorological event and several associatedcharacteristics, such as date, location, impact and source.
A verification proce-dure, consisting of comparisons with available measurements from the nearbyweather stations and with a reanalysis dataset, was applied in order to validatethe entries. The results show that the meteorological information was oftenpresent in the newspapers of the epoch.
Some climatic features could beretrieved such as seasonality of extreme events, temperature and precipitationcharacteristics. This paper demonstrates the potential of the collected informa-tion to further enhance the understanding of climate change, impacts and cli-mate perception at the end of the 19th century in Romania.