We adopt an existing data assimilation technique to constrain a model simulation to follow three important modes of variability, the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Southern Annular Mode. How it compares to the observed climate is evaluated, with improvements over simulations without data assimilation found over many regions, particularly the tropics, the North Atlantic and Europe, and discrepancies with global cooling following volcanic eruptions are reconciled.

We present the weather diaries of the Kirch family, 1677–1774, containing weather observations made in Leipzig and Guben and, from 1701 onward, instrumental observations made in Berlin. We publish the imaged diaries (10445 images) and the digitised measurements (from 1720 onward). This is one of the oldest and longest meteorological record from Germany. The digitised pressure data show good agreement with neighbouring stations, highlighting their potential for weather reconstruction.

Climate reconstructions give insights into monthly and seasonal climate variability of the past few hundred years. However, to understand past extreme weather events and to relate them to impacts, for example to periods of extreme floods, reconstructions on a daily timescale are needed. Here, we present a reconstruction of 258 years of high-resolution daily temperature and precipitation fields for Switzerland covering the period 1763 to 2020, which is based on instrumental measurements.

We present daily temperature and sea level pressure fields for Europe for the severe winter 1788/1789 based on historical meteorological measurements and an analogue reconstruction approach. The resulting reconstruction skilfully reproduces temperature and pressure variations over central and western Europe. We find intense blocking systems over northern Europe and several abrupt, strong cold air outbreaks, demonstrating that quantitative weather reconstruction of past extremes is possible.

We present in this manuscript the earliest records made at San Fernando, very close to Cádiz (SW Spain). Several previous works have already recovered a significant amount of meteorological records of interest in these localities. However, unnoticed previously more than 40,000 daily meteorological observations recorded at the Royal Observatory of the Spanish Navy (located in San Fernando) remained neither digitized nor studied. We analyze in detail these newly recovered meteorological readings.