Climate of the Past
Climate of the Past
CP
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https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2016-78
© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2016-78
© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Preprints
12 Jul 2016
 | 12 Jul 2016
Status: this preprint has been withdrawn by the authors.

The 1816 ‘year without a summer’ in an atmospheric reanalysis

Philip Brohan, Gilbert P. Compo, Stefan Brönnimann, Robert J. Allan, Renate Auchmann, Yuri Brugnara, Prashant D. Sardeshmukh, and Jeffrey S. Whitaker

Abstract. Two hundred years ago a very cold and wet summer devastated agriculture in Europe and North America, causing widespread food shortages, unrest and suffering – the "year without a summer". This is usually blamed on the eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, the previous April, but making a link between these two events has proven difficult, as the major impacts were at smaller space and time-scales than we can reconstruct with tree-ring observations and climate model simulations. Here we show that the very limited network of station barometer observations for the period is nevertheless enough to enable a dynamical atmospheric reanalysis to reconstruct the daily weather of summer 1816, over much of Europe. Adding stratospheric aerosol from the Tambora eruption to the reanalysis improves its reconstruction, explicitly linking the volcano to the weather impacts.

This preprint has been withdrawn.

How to cite. Brohan, P., Compo, G. P., Brönnimann, S., Allan, R. J., Auchmann, R., Brugnara, Y., Sardeshmukh, P. D., and Whitaker, J. S.: The 1816 ‘year without a summer’ in an atmospheric reanalysis, Clim. Past Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2016-78, 2016.
Received: 07 Jul 2016 – Discussion started: 12 Jul 2016
Philip Brohan, Gilbert P. Compo, Stefan Brönnimann, Robert J. Allan, Renate Auchmann, Yuri Brugnara, Prashant D. Sardeshmukh, and Jeffrey S. Whitaker

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AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed
Status: closed
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
Printer-friendly Version - Printer-friendly version Supplement - Supplement
Philip Brohan, Gilbert P. Compo, Stefan Brönnimann, Robert J. Allan, Renate Auchmann, Yuri Brugnara, Prashant D. Sardeshmukh, and Jeffrey S. Whitaker
Philip Brohan, Gilbert P. Compo, Stefan Brönnimann, Robert J. Allan, Renate Auchmann, Yuri Brugnara, Prashant D. Sardeshmukh, and Jeffrey S. Whitaker

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This preprint has been withdrawn.

Short summary
We have used modern weather forecasting tools to reconstruct the dreadful European weather of 200 years ago – 1816 was the ‘year without a summer’; harvests failed, and people starved. We can show that 1816’s extreme climate was caused by the eruption of the Tambora volcano the previous year. This means we have some chance of predicting such extreme summers if they occur in future, though this is still a challenge to today’s forecast models.
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