Synthetic weather diaries: Concept and application to Swiss weather in 1816

Abstract

Climate science is about to produce numerical daily weather reconstructions based on meteorological measurements for central Europe 250 years back. Using a pilot reconstruction covering Switzerland at a 2×2 km2 resolution for 1816, this paper presents methods to translate numerical reconstructions and derived indices into text describing daily weather and the state of vegetation. This facilitates comparison with historical sources and analyses of the effects of weather on different aspects of life. The translation, termed "synthetic weather diary", could possibly be used to train machine learning approaches to do the reverse: Reconstruct past weather from categorised text entries in diaries.