CPD Climate of the Past Discussions CPD 1814-9359 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/cpd-7-2297-2011 Climate variability in Andalusia (southern Spain) during the period 1701–1850 AD from documentary sources: evaluation and comparison with climate model simulations Rodrigo F. S. 1 Gómez-Navarro J. J. 2 Montávez Gómez J. P. 2 Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Almería, La Cañada de San Urbano, s/n, 04120, Almería, Spain Grupo de Modelización Atmosférica Regional, Universidad de Murcia, Spain 07 07 2011 7 4 2297 2339 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/7/2297/2011/cpd-7-2297-2011.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/7/2297/2011/cpd-7-2297-2011.pdf

In this work, a reconstruction of climatic conditions in Andalusia (southern Iberia Peninsula) during the period 1701–1850, as well as an evaluation of its associated uncertainties, is presented. This period is interesting because it is characterized by a minimum in the solar irradiance (Dalton Minimum, around 1800), as well as intense volcanic activity (for instance, the eruption of the Tambora in 1815), when the increasing atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> concentrations were of minor importance. The reconstruction is based on the analysis of a wide variety of documentary data. The reconstruction methodology is based on accounting the number of extreme events in past, and inferring mean value and standard deviation using the assumption of normal distribution for the seasonal means of climate variables. This reconstruction methodology is tested within the pseudoreality of a high-resolution paleoclimate simulation performed with the regional climate model MM5 coupled to the global model ECHO-G. Results show that the reconstructions are influenced by the reference period chosen and the threshold values used to define extreme values. This creates uncertainties which are assesed within the context of the climate simulation. An ensemble of reconstructions was obtained using two different reference periods and two pairs of percentiles as threshold values. Results correspond to winter temperature, and winter, spring, and autumn rainfall, and they are compared with simulations of the climate model for the considered period. The comparison of the distribution functions corresponding to 1790–1820 and 1960–1990 periods indicates that during the Dalton Minimum the frequency of dry and warm (wet and cold) winters was lesser (higher) than during the reference period. In spring and autumn it was detected an increase (decrease) in the frequency of wet (dry) seasons. Future research challenges are outlined.

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