The Great Frost of 1709: The year that Europe froze -- the coldest winter for 300 years at the end of Europe's Little Ice Age

BLOGGER'S NOTE: be sure and see the post on the stratospheric similarities between the prevailing winds during the winters of 1709 and 2009, here (hit the down-page key a few times to go down to the post).

1709: The year that Europe froze

by Stephanie Pain, New Scientist, Issue 2694, February 7, 2009

People across Europe awoke on 6 January 1709 to find the temperature had plummeted. A three-week freeze was followed by a brief thaw -- and then the mercury plunged again and stayed there. From Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south, and from Czechoslovakia in the east to the west coast of France, everything turned to ice. The sea froze. Lakes and rivers froze, and the soil froze to a depth of a metre or more. Livestock died from cold in their barns, chicken's combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travellers froze to death on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years.

Part of a lagoon which froze over in 1708, Venice, Italy, by Gabriele Bella (1733-99) (Image: The Art Archive / Querini Stampalia Foundation Venice / Gianni Dagli Orti)

IN ENGLAND they called the winter of 1709 the Great Frost. In France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that ushered in a year of famine and food riots. In Scandinavia the Baltic froze so thoroughly that people could walk across the ice as late as April. In Switzerland hungry wolves crept into villages. Venetians skidded across their frozen lagoon, while off Italy's west coast, sailors aboard English men-of-war died from the cold. "I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the Memory of Man," wrote William Derham, one of England's most meticulous meteorological observers. He was right. Three hundred years on, it holds the record as the coldest European winter of the past half-millennium.

Derham was the Rector of Upminster, a short ride north-east of London. He had been checking his thermometer and barometer three times a day since 1697. Similarly dedicated observers scattered across Europe did much the same and their records tally remarkably closely. On the night of 5 January, the temperature fell dramatically and kept on falling. On 10 January, Derham logged -12 °C, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 °C on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with a vengeance and stayed until mid-March.

Later that year, Derham wrote a detailed account of the freeze and the destruction it caused for the Royal Society's Transactions. Fish froze in the rivers, game lay down in the fields and died, and small birds perished by the million. The loss of tender herbs and exotic fruit trees was no surprise, but even hardy native oaks and ash trees succumbed. The loss of the wheat crop was "a general calamity." England's troubles were trifling, however, compared to the suffering across the English Channel.

In France, the freeze gripped the whole country as far as the Mediterranean. Even the king and his courtiers at the sumptuous Palace of Versailles struggled to keep warm. The Duchess of Orleans wrote to her aunt in Germany: "I am sitting by a roaring fire, have a screen before the door, which is closed, so that I can sit here with a sable fur piece around my neck and my feet in a bearskin sack and I am still shivering with cold and can barely hold the pen. Never in my life have I seen a winter such as this one."

In more humble homes, people went to bed and woke to find their nightcaps frozen to the bed-head. Bread froze so hard it took an axe to cut it. According to a canon from Beaune in Burgundy, "travellers died in the countryside, livestock in the stables, wild animals in the woods; nearly all the birds died, wine froze in barrels and public fires were lit to warm the poor." From all over the country came reports of people found frozen to death. And with roads and rivers blocked by snow and ice, it was impossible to transport food to the cities. Paris waited three months for fresh supplies.

People went to bed and woke to find their nightcaps frozen to the bed-head

There was worse to come. Everywhere, fruit, nut and olive trees died. The winter wheat crop was destroyed. When spring finally arrived, the cold was replaced by worsening food shortages. In Paris, many survived only because the authorities, fearing an uprising, forced the rich to provide soup kitchens. With no grain to make bread, some country people made "flour" by grinding ferns, bulking out their loaves with nettles and thistles. By the summer, there were reports of starving people in the fields "eating grass like sheep." Before the year was out more than a million had died from cold or starvation.

The fact that so many people left accounts of the freeze suggests the winter of 1708/1709 was unusually bad, but just how extraordinary was it?

In 2004, Jürg Luterbacher, a climatologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, produced a month-by-month reconstruction of Europe's climate since 1500, using a combination of direct measurements, proxy indicators of temperature such as tree rings and ice cores, and data gleaned from historical documents (Science, Vol 303, p. 1499). The winter of 1708-1709 was the coldest. Across large parts of Europe the temperature was as much as 7 °C below the average for 20th-century Europe.

Why it was quite so cold is harder to explain. The Little Ice Age was at its climax and Europe was experiencing climatically turbulent times: the 1690s saw a string of cold summers and failed harvests, while the summer of 1707 was so hot people died from heat exhaustion. Overall, the climate was colder, with the sun's output at its lowest for millennia. There were some spectacular volcanic eruptions in 1707 and 1708, including Mount Fuji in Japan and Santorini and Vesuvius in Europe. These would have sent dust high into the atmosphere, forming a veil over Europe. Such dust veils normally lead to cooler summers and sometimes warmer winters, but climatologists think that during this persistent cold phase, dust may have depressed both summer and winter temperatures.

None of these things accounts for the extremity of that particular winter, however. "Something unusual seems to have been happening," says Dennis Wheeler, a climatologist at the University of Sunderland, UK. As part of the European Union's Millennium Project, which aims to reconstruct the past 1000 years of Europe's climate, Wheeler is extracting data from Royal Navy logbooks, which provide daily observations of wind and weather. "With daily data you can produce very reliable monthly averages but you can also see what happened from one day to the next," says Wheeler. He and his colleagues have now compiled a database of daily observations stretching back to 1685 from the English Channel area. "This is a key climatic zone. The weather there reflects wider conditions across the Atlantic, which is where in normal circumstances much European weather originates."

The most immediate cause of cold winters in Europe is usually an icy wind from Siberia. "What you would expect would be long runs of easterly winds with a well-developed anticyclone over Scandinavia sucking in cold air from Siberia," says Wheeler. Instead, his data show a predominance of southerly and westerly winds -- which would normally bring warm air to Europe. "There were only occasional northerlies and easterlies and those were never for more than a few days," says Wheeler. Another odd finding was that January was unusually stormy. Winter storms tend to bring milder, if wilder, weather to Europe. "This combination of cold, storms and westerlies suggests some other mechanism was responsible for that winter."

There may be no easy explanation for the Great Frost of 1709, but unexpected weather patterns revealed by Wheeler's data underline why climate reconstructions are so important. "We need to explain the natural variation in climate over past centuries so that we can tease apart all those factors that contribute to climate change. But before we can do that we need to nail down those changes in detail," says Wheeler. "Climate doesn't behave consistently and warmer and colder, drier and wetter periods can't always be explained by the same mechanisms." In the two decades after that terrible winter, the climate warmed very rapidly. "Some people point to that and say today's warming is nothing new. But they are not comparable. The factors causing warming then were quite different from those operating now."

Link to article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126942.100-1709-the-year-that-europe-froze.html

Cosmic rays detected deep underground reveal secrets of the upper atmosphere

Cosmic rays detected deep underground reveal secrets of the upper atmosphere

by Louisa Watts, January 21, 2009: joint press release issued by the UK's National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)

Cosmic-rays detected half a mile underground in a disused U.S. iron-mine can be used to detect major weather events occurring 20 miles up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, a new study has revealed.

Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and led by scientists from the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), this remarkable study shows how the number of high-energy cosmic-rays reaching a detector deep underground, closely matches temperature measurements in the upper atmosphere (known as the stratosphere). For the first time, scientists have shown how this relationship can be used to identify weather events that occur very suddenly in the stratosphere during the Northern Hemisphere winter. These events can have a significant effect on the severity of winters we experience, and also on the amount of ozone over the poles -- being able to identify them and understand their frequency is crucial for informing our current climate and weather-forecasting models to improve predictions.

Working in collaboration with a major U.S.-led particle physics experiment called MINOS (managed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), the scientists analysed a four-year record of cosmic-ray data detected in a disused iron-mine in the U.S. state of Minnesota. What they observed was a strikingly close relationship between the cosmic-rays and stratospheric temperature -- this they could understand: the cosmic-rays, known as muons are produced following the decay of other cosmic rays, known as mesons. Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere expands the atmosphere so that fewer mesons are destroyed on impact with air, leaving more to decay naturally to muons. Consequently, if temperature increases so does the number of muons detected.

What did surprise the scientists, however, were the intermittent and sudden increases observed in the levels of muons during the winter months. These jumps in the data occurred over just a few days. On investigation, they found these changes coincided with very sudden increases in the temperature of the stratosphere (by up to 40 ^oC in places!). Looking more closely at supporting meteorological data, they realised they were observing a major weather event, known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. On average, these occur every other year and are notoriously unpredictable. This study has shown, for the first time, that cosmic-ray data can be used effectively to identify these events.

Lead scientist for the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Dr Scott Osprey said: “Up until now we have relied on weather balloons and satellite data to provide information about these major weather events. Now we can potentially use records of cosmic-ray data dating back 50 years to give us a pretty accurate idea of what was happening to the temperature in the stratosphere over this time. Looking forward, data being collected by other large underground detectors around the world, can also be used to study this phenomenon.”

Dr Giles Barr, co-author of the study from the University of Oxford added: “It's fun sitting half a mile underground doing particle physics. It's even better to know that from down there, we can also monitor a part of the atmosphere that is otherwise quite tricky to measure.”

Interestingly, the muon cosmic-ray dataset used in this study was collected as a by-product of the MINOS experiment, which is designed to investigate properties of neutrinos, but which also measures muons originating high up in the atmosphere, as background noise in the detector. Having access to these data has led to the production of a valuable dataset of benefit to climate researchers.

Professor Jenny Thomas, deputy spokesperson for MINOS from University College London said, “The question we set out to answer at MINOS is to do with the basic properties of fundamental particles called neutrinos which is a crucial ingredient in our current model of the Universe, but as is often the way, by keeping an open mind about the data collected, the science team has been able to find another, unanticipated benefit that aids our understanding of weather and climate phenomena.”

Dr Osprey commented: “This study is a great example of what can be done through international partnerships and cross-disciplinary research. One can only guess what other secrets are waiting to be revealed.”

Link to more information: http://www.ncas.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=446&Itemid=249

Stu Ostro: Update on Global Warming, Weather, and the Arctic

Note to readers: One of my particular concerns has been the "odd," "strange," and "unusual" (to quote from articles that I have read) changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation, the polar vortices, and the like.

The post below was taken from another blog. I will be contacting the author to seek his permission and further comments.

It was taken from this blog: http://climate.weather.com/blog/9_14587.html#readcomments

(Please take careful note of the second figure, which shows a very "unusual" high pressure zone over the Arctic.)

by Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist

In my "A Connection Between Global Warming and Weather" blog in September I linked to a PDF of the latest installment of a PowerPoint presentation I had been giving at and outside of TWC, and I recently presented an updated version at the 2008 Steamboat Weather Summit. I wanted to again make the content available, so here is a new PDF (large >20MB file). For those who have seen the previous version, the new material is mainly the first few slides and then many of them from #205 on. Here are some highlights and things to expound upon.

My ongoing goal is to analyze and understand what's happening to our weather and why. If 10 years from now I'm still alive and blogging, and we look back and see that the recent goings-on were just a blip, then that's what I'll write. But for now at least, the types of patterns I noted in that September blog have continued to occur. First there were a couple of events about which I posted follow-up entries: the extreme warm wave which affected the Chicago Marathon and the Yankees/Indians game, and in the same month the record largest October tornado outbreak (and one which was unusually far north for that time of year).

Then in late October across the conterminous U.S., anomalously high 500 millibar heights (please refer to the September entry for a thorough explanation of that stuff) interacted with a large, retrograding, and bizarre-for-October cutoff low. That took place at the time of the exceptionally strong Santa Ana wind episode; and, although there were non-meteorological factors involved in the catastrophe in the Mexican state of Tabasco, the southern extension of the trough associated with the cutoff triggered thunderstorms with heavy rain that helped initiate the flooding.

In mid-December there was a very strong, toasty subtropical ridge, on the periphery of which the historic ice storm in the central U.S. occurred and Olga developed in the Caribbean region, one of the latest tropical storms on record there (and maybe the latest to make landfall in the U.S., depending on what NHC officially does with Olga's regeneration).

Recently there's been a topsy-turvey upper-level pattern in Asia and Europe, which led to stormy and unusually cold and snowy weather in some places. To reiterate: despite its paradoxical nature, not only is that sort of outcome not mutually exclusive with global warming, it is consistent with the types of patterns in recent years that have been driven by strong ridges of high pressure aloft at mid and high latitudes directly related to the overall warming.

Fig. 1.

And since the new year commenced, in between a couple of cold but unremarkable-for-January bouts of Arctic air in the U.S. (including the current one) there was the exceedingly warm, April-like pattern which begat that amazingly-far-north tornado outbreak.

And the above can't all be attributed to La Nina.

From a "synoptic meteorology" standpoint, though, perhaps the most extreme anomaly was in early December.

There was an incredible ridge of high pressure aloft for that far north at that time of year (500 mb heights > 570 dm) in and around the Alaskan Arctic. To the south of that was a gigantic and fierce trough, which resulted in the "Great Coastal Gale" in Oregon and Washington that was unusual in its combination of intensity (gusts as high as 129 mph), duration, and how far away from the coast the surface low was at the peak of the storm.

Fig. 2.

This NCEP reanalysis data analyzed 500 milibar height anomalies over the Arctic Ocean in excess of 600 meters above the climatological mean. That's outrageous. None of the many previous cases I had investigated since 2005 had an anomaly higher than ~425 meters, and indeed, Barrow and Fairbanks set their December records for 500 millibar heights (period of record going back to 1948).

There were also surface temperature anomalies underneath that ridge upwards of 25C ... and this happened in the vicinity of where the stunning sea ice loss was in late summer and near where in early December there was still a chunk missing ... pure coincidence?

Of course, since the September minimum, the waters of the Arctic Ocean have refrozen, but the ice area is still nearly a million square kilometers below the 1979-2000 mean. Much of the new ice is thinner than average, and it'll be very interesting -- and important -- to see what happens next summer and the few summers thereafter. Sheldon Drobot recently posted a good analysis of the situation in these TWC Forecast Earth blog pages, and Bob Henson did the same in the UCAR Quarterly. Bob also addresses the much-ballyhooed ice increase in the Southern Hemisphere. An above-average sea ice area in the Southern Hemisphere and global warming are not mutually exclusive!

But ... be that as it may ... can't all of this simply be explained by naturally-occurring phenomena, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and the associated Great Pacific Climate Shift which commenced in the mid-1970s? That's what the viewpoint was in this article, which cited me by name and alluded to my September GW/weather blog.

Actually, I'm in agreement that the PDO and other types of natural variability, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which was also cited in that article, play an important role in weather and climate, and clearly what took place a few decades ago was no exception.

However, I have a few questions.

Here is the surface temperature correlation to the PDO which was cited:

Fig. 3.

And the anomalies from the late 1970s through 1997, which were also cited, because of the pattern's similarity to the above map:

Fig. 4.

But here are the surface temperature anomalies for the past 10 years using the same scale (followed by a graph of the PDO index showing that it peaked from the late 1970s into 1998 and has on average been lower than that since then). Notice anything which stands out? Why was this anomaly map for the past decade left out of that article? And if the PDO does not explain this, what does?

Fig. 5.

There's a new study by Meehl, Hu, and Santer on this mid-1970s climate shift being presented in New Orleans this week at the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, which I am attending. The abstract reads:

"A significant shift of Pacific climate occurred in the mid-1970s with effects that extended globally. One view is that this change was entirely natural and a product of internally-generated decadal variability of the Pacific climate system. However, during the mid-1970s there was also a significant increase of global temperature and changes to a number of other quantities that have been associated with changes of external forcings, particularly increases of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels. We analyze an un-forced control run from a global coupled climate model as well as 20th century simulations with changes in external forcings to show that the 1970s climate shift had a contribution from changes in external forcing superimposed on what was likely an inherent decadal fluctuation of the Pacific climate system. Thus this inherent decadal variability delayed to the 1970s what would have been a forced climate shift in the 1960s."

Maybe, though, you're skeptical of climate models' capabilities. Referring back to that article which touted the role of the PDO, could the combination of the PDO and the AMO explain everything?

Well, Figure 8 therein shows the value of the PDO+AMO dropping sharply during the past couple of years.

Nevertheless, what has happened recently?

The idea that planetary warming has ceased in the past decade has recently been in the news and analyzed. Has global warming stopped? And if so, is that further evidence that it's all a hoax?

Well, let's look a little closer ...

Positive temperature anomalies overwhelmed negative ones worldwide in 2007, with the warmth being particularly dramatic in Asia:

Fig. 6.

Yes, the land+ocean temps peaked a decade ago and although that level has been rivaled it has not been appreciably exceeded. But the 1998 spike was associated with the exceptionally strong El Nino at the time. In 2007, even with notable Arctic blasts in the U.S. in February and April and much-ballyhooed bouts of cold weather in South America, and despite ocean cooling (in large part due to the massive negative anomalies in the Pacific which extended well away from the equator as La Nina developed and flourished), the year was the warmest on land in the period of record going back to 1880.

Fig. 7.

There's always a certain amount of natural year-to-year variability, but clearly the overall land trend continues to be steadily upward. A recent study modeled in these natural variations in recent decades and projected the entire global average (land+ocean) out through the next one, with at least half the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the existing warmest year on record. By 2020 we'll have the luxury of those additional years of perspective and be able to see how that forecast verified. In the meantime, remember that 2007 was in the context of what happened in the Arctic during the summer. Those who are skeptical of global warming, its causes, and future prospects (as I once strongly was) like to point out that there's inherent forecast uncertainty, and that climate models can be wrong. I agree. But that can cut both ways: overestimating or underestimating the rapidity of the changes ... and so far when it comes to the Arctic, a crucial component of the Earth's climate system, it's stunningly been the latter in regard to sea ice. This chart from Bob Henson's article linked to above, and in turn courtesy of Marika Holland and the Community Climate System Model, shows how the ice decline (blue line) has not only radically deviated from the ensemble mean forecast (red line), it has exceeded that of any ensemble member (orange shading).

Fig. 8.

So what does it all mean? Well, if the Earth's weather patterns have already gone out of kilter and the nature of extremes is changing, and the Arctic has already passed a tipping point, then that has implications for adaptation to the effects of climate change. Now, I know this is a sensitive topic; there was even an entry on these pages a month ago titled, "Adapt! The Cry of the Coward"! So before my words are misconstrued, let me be clear that I'm not suggesting that this is totally in place of addressing the challenging issues associated with the mitigation of the human role in global warming. We won't be around a couple hundred years from now but to those who will be, what we do this century matters. And in general, as I've written in the past, we are tenants on this planet, not its owners, and we have a moral responsibility to coexist with it in a reasonable balance.

That having been said, the political and economic realities involved with deciding how far to go in forcing the issue of mitigation are difficult ones, while there is no question that the need to adapt is a given. Regardless of what happens in future centuries, we have the next 50 years and 20 years and decade and year and tomorrow to deal with. And it's not a question of which climate, a relatively cold or warm one, is "better," it's the rapidity of change which is problematic for human civilization (and the animal and plant worlds), as well as vulnerability to weather and climate phenomena such as floods, droughts, temperature extremes, and intense cyclones (tropical or otherwise). That's the case regardless of global warming, and a shift to a more volatile weather/climate regime would exacerbate the situation.

Although Roger Pielke Jr.'s points of view and mine may not always be identical, when I go back and read his paper on adaptation from 10 years ago, I'm hard-pressed to find anything in there I disagree with.

The bottom line is this: in addition to long-term trends, we need to focus on being able to deal with shorter-term anomalous and/or severe manifestations of global warming including day-to-day weather, as that's where the climate rubber hits the road.

Exceptionally Warm Winter Temperatures at Barrow, Alaska, Baseline Observatory

Global Monitoring Division - ESRL-GMD

The NOAA ESRL Barrow, Alaska, Atmospheric Baseline Observatory located on the most northerly habited point of land in the U.S, has been continuously measuring meteorological parameters since 1977. In November of this year, the average temperature at the observatory was +14.3F (+8C) warmer than the monthly norm. From December 1-10, 2007, the average temperature has been +22.2 F (+12.3C) warmer than the long term average for December. These exceptionally warm temperatures are likely due to heat from the warmer Arctic Ocean off shore from Barrow that is still not frozen for this winter. The Barrow Observatory chief, Dan Endres, who has been at the Barrow observatory for 23 years, notes that in the 1980s the ocean would generally freeze by the middle of October. In recent years, freeze-up has been occurring progressively later.

Background: The summer Arctic ice pack has been thinning and shrinking to unprecedented levels over the past decade. In the fall of this year, the edge of the Arctic ice pack was a record 300 miles (480 km) north of Barrow. The majority of the heat input to the Arctic during the winter is from the open ocean, which is slightly cooler than +32F (0C). The longer the ocean stays open, the more time there is for additional heat to be released into the Arctic atmosphere. The reduced ice pack and increased Arctic temperatures are thought to be related to atmospheric warming from the effects of increasing global greenhouse gas concentrations. However, changes in Arctic Ocean water circulation bringing warmer, lower latitude water to the Arctic, cannot be ruled out.

Significance: These recent changes in extent and thickness of the Arctic ice pack and the warming of the Arctic atmosphere are affecting seal and polar bear habitat, and whale migration patterns. Ship transport operators may soon use this longer open ocean as a sea-lane to transit the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Basin. In response to this probable occurrence, the U.S. Coast Guard is planning on opening a coast guard base at Barrow. The Canadian government has recently announced Canada will open a deepwater Arctic port for stationing Coast Guard and larger ships at the eastern end of the Northwest Passage.

More information: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/brw/index.html

Doppler Radar Map, U.S., December 12, 2007

This is a captured image of a doppler radar map of the United States on December 12, 2007, from the Weather Channel site (www.weather.com) showing the absolutely enormous front that stretched from the Rio Grande in Texas all the way to Maine.