A 425-year precipitation history from documentary weather anomalies and climate records at Palermo, Italy

For southern Europe, especially mediterranean Italy, our knowledge of environmental and climatic variations has until now been discontinuous or founded on very few multisecular precipitation series (Cantù and Narducci, 1967; Brunetti et al., 2004). Fortunately, the Italian area offers a wide range of descriptive documentary data (i.e., reports from chronicles, daily weather reports, religious ceremonies, local books, etc.), that makes this area ideal for climate reconstructions on various time and spatial scales prior to the instrumental period (Enzi and Camuffo, 1996; Diodato, 1999; Luterbacher et al., 2005). The pre-instrumental epoch includes the so-called Little Ice Age (LIA), variously assessed as AD 1300-1900, that is not expected to be homogeneous and sustained over large climatic regions (Bradley and Jones, 1993). So, climatic research at regional and sub-regional scales for the pre-instrumental epoch is useful for understanding the nature of climate variability on multi-decadal and longer timescales. In the last decades, several studies have reported climate reconstructions in some European localities based on documentary sources (for a synthesis see Brádzil et al., 2004). This research suggests that pre-instrumental documentary indices are promising tools for the reconstruction of rainfall and thermal regime fl uctuation. In this way, precipitation history for southern Europe during the period 15802004 AD was analyzed at the Palermo Astronomical Observatory (Sicily, Italy; Fig. 1a).