Recent Advances in the Historical Climatology of the Tropics and Subtropics

Historical documents from tropical regions contain weather information that can be used to reconstruct past climate variability, the occurrence of tropical storms, and El Niño and La Niña episodes. HistoricAl teMPerAture recoN-structioNs.Debates about recent global warming fundamentally hinge upon the availability of instrumental surface data from which temperature trends can be identified.Several compilations provide gridded monthly mean estimates of temperatures back to the mid-nineteenth century [see Jones and Mann (2004) for a review], but coverage becomes increasingly sparse during earlier decades, AFFiliAtioNs: Nash-school of environment and technology, university of brighton, brighton, united Kingdom, and school