Temperature patterns of the winters in the periods from 1703/04 to 1708/09 in Trenčín, Slovakia

The Diarium of the Jesuit order at Trenčín written in Latin contains systematic daily weather records (with some interruptions) from 8 November 1701 to 10 January 1710. Daily records from this period were kept by two administrators of the Jesuit dormitory (“regens convictus”) Ján Garajský and Juraj Košetič. After the death of Ján Garajský in 1702, the daily weather records are interrupted, so the winter season 1702/03 is without any weather information. With the arrival of his successor Juraj Košetič, such data appear only gradually in the course of 1703. Records related to temperature and precipitation patterns, cloudiness, as well as frequencies of different weather phenomena such as fogs, thunderstorms, strong winds. Information about floods and the occurrence of ice phenomena on the River Váh are also valuable.

In the contribution, we focus on the evaluation of the temperature patterns of individual winter seasons in this period. Winters are defined from December 1 to February 28 (or February 29). For analysis, we selected all daily data describing the temperature state of the weather. Based on this evidence, each day we classified by daily temperature indices (from -3 to +3). Although some winter seasons contain daily weather records for every single day, but not every record specifically relates to a temperature pattern. Out of a total of nine winters during this period, only 6 seasons had more than 70 percent of such daily temperature indices recorded, specifically 1703/04 (73%), 1704/05 (97%), 1705/06 (93%), 1706/07 (86%), 1707/08 (71%) and 1708/09 (81%). From them, the coldest winter season in Trenčín was 1708/09 (with cold temperature pattern), then 1704/05 and 1706/07 (with moderately cold temperature pattern), 1705/06 and 1703/04 (with mild temperature pattern), and the warmest winter season was 1707/08 (with mild temperature pattern). Overall, the coldest month was January 1709, which was also the only very cold month in this ranking. The warmest month was December 1706 with mild temperature pattern.

Like the result of the hard winter of 1708/09 was also the occurrence of ice phenomena (ice cover, ice jam with ice flood later in March) on the River Váh in Trenčín, which are recorded in the Jesuit Diary of this period.

 

Acknowledgment: This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-20-0374.

 

Keywords: Jesuit Diary, winter, temperature indices, cold, mild, Trenčín, ice phenomena