How useful could Arabic documentary sources be for reconstructing past climate?

Trees, corals, ice cores and documentary\udevidence provide high-resolution proxies\udthat allow past climate to be reconstructed\ud(Jones et al., 2009). Documentary evidence\udincludes all forms of written historical information\udabout past climate or weather, but\udits use for climate reconstruction is restricted\udto locations for which there is a rich documentary\udlegacy. Several climate analyses\udand reconstructions have been undertaken\udusing documentary evidence from Europe\ud(Brázdil et al., 2005; 2010), North and South\udAmerica (Dupigny-Giroux and Mock, 2009;\udPrieto and García-Herrera, 2009; Neukom\udet al., 2010), Asia (Ge et al., 2005; 2010; Aono\udand Kazui, 2008; Hirano and Mikami, 2008)\udand oceanic areas (García-Herrera et al.,\ud2005). The Islamic World is a region for\udwhich such sources could also be used to\udreconstruct past climate, as indeed they\udhave been widely used for astronomy and\udgeophysics. Astronomers have used the\udobservations made by Arab astronomers for\udcenturies, with some remarkable examples.\udHistorical eclipse observations, recorded by\udvarious ancient and mediaeval cultures\udincluding Arabs, have enabled changes in\udthe Earth’s rate of rotation to be monitored\udwith fair precision as far back as around\ud700 AD (Stephenson, 2003). Rada and\udStephenson (1992) catalogued meteor\udshowers using mediaeval Arab chronicles\udand Ahn (2003) investigated the spatial distribution\udof meteor streams crossing the orbit of the Earth from the tenth to the fourteenth\udcenturies using chronicles from\udKorea, Japan, China, Arabia and Europe.\udDocumentary sources from Iberia have been\udused to identify and date such astronomical\udphenomena as eclipses and comets (Vernet,\ud1982), naked-eye sunspots (Vaquero and\udGallego, 2002) and aurora sightings\ud(Vaquero and Gallego, 2001). The work of\udBasurah (2006) provides descriptions for 18\udaurora displays on various dates at low latitudes\udin the Mediterranean area taken from\udIslamic chronicles (ninth to sixteenth centuries).\udIn seismology, Arabic chronicles\udwere extensively used to prepare the\udSeismic Catalogue of the Iberian Peninsula\ud(Martínez and Mezcua, 2002) and to study\udseismic activity in Syria and Palestine\ud(Ambraseseys, 2005).\udHowever, the use of these sources to\udrecover climate information is, to the best\udof our knowledge, still very limited (Bulliet,\ud2009; Jones et al., 2009). Here we describe\uda preliminary inquiry based on Arabic documentary\udsources from Iraq. We would stress\udthe antiquity of the documents used, with\uddates in the period 816–1009 AD. The\udsources consulted are Arabic chronicles that\udnarrate the social, political and religious history\udof different regions in a form very characteristic\udof Arab culture.Peer reviewe