The use of spanish historical archives to reconstruct climate variability

Abstract

The use of documentary sources is a well-established technique for reconstructing climate during the past few centuries, when no instrumental or similar sources of data are available. Such sources have been used to study climate phenomena such as El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO; Quinn et al. 1987; Quinn and Neal 1992; Ortlieb 2000) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO; Jones et al. 1997; Luterbacher et al. 1999). They have also been used to describe regional climate variability, especially in Europe and Asia. In recent years, substantial efforts have been made to obtain climatic information from Spanish colonial archives covering the period 1500– 1900.