Statistical reconstruction of daily temperature and sea level pressure in Europe for the severe winter 1788/89

The winter 1788/89 was one of the coldest winters Europe had witnessed in the past 300 years. Fortunately, for historical climatologists, thisextreme event occurred at a time when many stations across Europe, both private and as part of coordinated networks, were making quantitativeobservations of the weather. This means that several dozen early instrumental series are available to carry out an in-depth study of this severecold spell. While there have been attempts to present daily spatial information for this winter, there is more to be done to understand the weathervariability and day-to-day processes that characterised this weather extreme. In this study, we seek to reconstruct daily spatial high-resolutiontemperature and sea level pressure fields of the winter 1788/89 in Europe from November through February. The reconstruction is performed with ananalogue resampling method (ARM) that uses both historical instrumental data and a weather type classification. Analogue reconstructions are thenpost-processed through an ensemble Kalman fitting (EnKF) technique. Validation experiments show good skill for both reconstructed variables, whichmanage to capture the dynamics of the extreme in relation to the large-scale circulation. These results are promising for more such studies to beundertaken, focusing on different extreme events and other regions in Europe and perhaps even further back in time. The dataset presented in thisstudy may be of sufficient quality to allow historians to better assess the environmental and social impacts of the harsh weather.