Assessing North Atlantic climate variability since the early 1800s through historical New England whaling ship logbooks and reanalyses

Historical wind patterns in the North Atlantic are assessed using U.S. whaling logbooks of voyages from the 19th century, a time when instrumental wind observations were not widely available. The recordings from whaling ship logbooks provide systematic daily to sub-daily information about wind force, wind direction, and other weather observations (e.g., precipitation, sea state) over a period from ca. 1785-1915 and are housed in the New England archives by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Nantucket Historical Association, and Providence Public Library. The extracted data from the whaling logbooks is quality checked, and the qualitative wind descriptions transferred to the Beaufort wind force scale to better compare it to the 20th-Century-Reanalysis. Specifically, the whaling ship logbook-sourced wind recordings are used in conjunction with several indices of North Atlantic climate variability, such as North Atlantic Oscillation, East Atlantic Pattern, and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, to explore variations and change in predominant North Atlantic wind patterns in the past. Here we demonstrate that the wind data from the whaling ship logbooks agrees with mean wind patterns and climate variability reconstructed for the North Atlantic and therefore provides valuable insights into the past wind patterns in this area complementing existing reanalysis products. We further demonstrate how qualitative descriptive wind information can be turned into quantitative information that can be directly compared with numerical data from reanalysis models. Since the comparison of the historical logbook data with the 20th-Century-Reanalysis data shows overall good agreement, it can be used to gain a further understanding of the dominant climate patterns in the North Atlantic and might aid development of improved indices of North Atlantic climate variability, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation or Azores High index.