Database of the 19th century instrumental meteorological records in East Asia and its application for studying past climate variability (in Japanese)
Published in Research Bulletin of Asahi Breweries Foundation 19, 129-135 in 2006
M. Zaiki, Gunther P. Können, Phil D. Jones, and T. Tsukahara
Till recently no instrumental data in Japan were believed to exist. Their addition to the previous backward extension of Japanese series, as based on the recently recovered intermittent Dejima/Nagasaki series 1819-1878, implies that the 19th century extension of the Japanese instrumental record no longer contains major temporal gaps. Now the corrected and homogenized monthly temperature and pressure of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagasaki are ready for scientific use. The recovered data were used for a preliminary calculation of the West-Japan Temperature (WJT) series, which is a representative temperature series for the area. The existence of a warm epoch in the 1850s over W-Japan and a downward temperature trend till the early 20th century, as previously inferred from documentary data, is confirmed from the WJT data.