Climatological observations from ship logbooks between 1750 and 1854 (release 2.1)

• Main Authors: Jones, Philip D, Wheeler, Dennis A, Können, Gunther P, Koek, Frits B, Prieto, Maria del Rosario, García-Herrera, Ricardo
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA - Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science 2007
• Subjects: Underway cruise track measurements; Cliwoc_cruise; Climatological Database for the Worlds Oceans 1750-1854 CLIWOC; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.611088; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.611088

The Climatological Database for the World's Oceans: 1750-1854 (CLIWOC) project, which concluded in 2004, abstracted more than 280,000 daily weather observations from ships' logbooks from British, Dutch, French, and Spanish naval vessels engaged in imperial business in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These data, now compiled into a database, provide valuable information for the reconstruction of oceanic wind field patterns for this key period that precedes the time in which anthropogenic influences on climate became evident. These reconstructions, in turn, provide evidence for such phenomena as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Of equal importance is the finding that the CLIWOC database the first coordinated attempt to harness the scientific potential of this resource represents less than 10 percent of the volume of data currently known to reside in this important but hitherto neglected source. : In agreement with the project, in 2010 the data set in its final version (2.1) was copied from the CLIWOC website and, after format conversion, archived in PANGAEA. This version allows the download of selected cruises or the complete data set as zip archive. (For processing the tool Pan2Applic is recommended (doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.288115). The original format is kept in data set doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.743343.