Reconstructing the climate of the Extremadura region (SW Spain) from documentary sources

In recent years, our research group has tried to improve the knowledge of the historical climate of the Extremadura region, located in the interior of the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. Some results can be highlighted:

• Temperature and precipitation indices were constructed for the period 1750-1840 from the correspondence of the Duke of Feria (Fernández-Fernández et al., 2014, 2015, 2017).
• We have recovered many “pro pluvia” rogation dates (Domínguez-Castro et al., 2021) and we have seen their relationship with the North Atlantic Oscillation (Bravo-Paredes et al., 2020).
• We have studied the catastrophic floods of the Guadiana River since AD1500 (Bravo-Paredes et al., 2021).
• We have recovered more than 700,000 meteorological data from the Extremadura region taken in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Vaquero et al., 2022), including some uncommon series (Bravo-Paredes et al., 2019).

In recent months, we have started a study of the meteorological information published by the regional press of Extremadura in the last 150 years and here we will present some preliminary results.

References

Bravo-Paredes, N. et al. (2019) Tellus B 71, 1663597.

Bravo-Paredes, N. et al. (2020) Atmosphere 11(3), 282.

Bravo-Paredes, N. et al. (2021) Science of the Total Environment 797, 149141.

Domínguez-Castro, F. et al. (2021) Scientific Data 8, 186.

Fernández-Fernández, M.I. et al. (2014) Climatic Change 126, 107.

Fernández-Fernández, M.I. et al. (2015) Climatic Change 129, 267.

Fernández-Fernández, M.I. et al. (2017) Climatic Change 141, 671.

Vaquero, J.M. et al. (2022) Geoscience Data Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.131