Introduction

Introduction

The existence of abundant meteorological data from logbooks of different European countries constitutes a common and invaluable heritage of the most outstanding scientific interest. The analysis of the logbooks content will contribute to characterise climate during XVIII th and XIX th centuries and to asses climate change.

These logbooks are an unique source of information which can not be obtained from any other way and will help to understand climate variability for a period and area (the oceans) with scarce data until now. The availability of such data to the scientific community will contribute to a better detection of climate change. The main aim of the project is to produce and make freely available for the scientific community the world’s firsts daily oceanic climatological database for the period 1750 to 1850. The database will provide a better knowledge of oceanic climate variability over the study period. Data will be obtained from documentary sources, mostly logbooks records, which are kept in a number of European archives in Spain, Britain, Holland and France. The original records will be transcribed and introduced into a computer based database.

Better knowledge of climate variability during the study period from sources that have not been exploited until now will be obtained. They will contribute to a better assessment of climate change especially of the behaviour of the major teleconnections. The results will be available for the whole scientific community, which will use them in different types of studies: Climate Variability analysis, modeling testing and calibration or climate change modeling and detection.