Using Historic Ship Data to Reconstruct the North Atlantic Oscillation from 1750 to 1850

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a climatic oscillation of the strengthening and weakening of the Icelandic Low (IL) and the Azores High (AH). The areas that NAO affects most directly are Europe, North Africa and Eastern Canada. When the NAO is said to be positive, Northern Europe receives warm, wet conditions and the Mediterranean coastlines are dry. When the NAO is said to be negative, the converse occurs. The IL and AH weakens allowing the Jetstream and storm tracks to venture further south bringing the moisture to North Africa and leaving Northern Europe colder and drier than normal. In Eastern Canada, the positive (negative) NAO brings colder (warmer) temperatures due to the position of the Jetstream. This poster will do a reconstruction of the NAO from 1750 to 1850 and correlate the historic ship data findings to tree-ring chronologies. Tree-ring data from Quebec, Morocco and Norway is used to correlate the rainfall proxy data to the changing storm tracks. Though the main focus will be the use of historic ship data from Climatological Database for the World's Oceans (CLIWOC), the findings will be correlated to find the usefulness of this data set and help reconstruct the NAO during this time period. Here, the question whether this historic ship data is reliable (or not) is answered.