| dc.description.abstract | A reconstruction of climate at the southern end of Hudson
Bay has been developed for the period from 1714 to 1852 from
diaries, weather journals and instrumental records maintained
by employees of the Hudson's Bay Company. In order
to cope with a variety of data, that can be generally classified
as historical or secular, a coding technique for adaptation
to a computer was developed that allowed for the
integration of the two distinctly different types of material.
Two sites at York Factory and Churchill Factory located
approximately 100 miles apart on the southwest shore of Hudson
Bay were studied. In this way homogeneity could be
checked because changes at one site would be reflected in
changes at the other unless they were caused by local variations.
The study provides a long term record of climate
change in a region that has received very little attention
and yet is very significant to the general pattern of climates
in the northern hemisphere.
Analysis of temperature, wind, precipitation, thunder and
lightning, frost, and phenologic events indicate trends similar
to those found in other parts of the northern hemisphere,
but attempts at comparison of individual years with
those experienced in Europe proved fruitless. The weather
was more severe than at present in the first half of the
18th Century with colder temperatures, more days with snowfall
and a higher percentage of northerly winds. From approximately 1780 to 1815 there appears to have been a great
deal of variability in the weather particularly in the number
of days with precipitation. A critical change seems to
have occurred in 1760. Prior to that date the two sites experienced
very similar weather but after that date the variations
are similar but the intensities and frequencies of
events are quite different. This appears to indicate a
change in the mean position of the Arctic Front so that York
Factory, which had previously experienced Tundra type weather
similar to Churchill Factory, after that date had weather
symptomatic of the Boreal forest region | en_US |
