Improved Understanding of Past Climatic Variability from Early Daily European Instrumental Sources

Climate can be defined as an ensemble of many weather phenomena. Clima­ tologists often use the mean (conventionally the monthly and annual mean) of weather-related parameters to describe climate. The mean value, however, is not all the climate. Climatic changes might occur if certain aspects of the distribution of extreme values change, while the mean does not. Katz and Brown (1992), for example,...