Nineteenth century global wind data from historical New England whaling ship voyages (1820–1900 CE)

Maritime weather data from historical ship logbooks are used to assess 19th century surface wind conditions. Housed across several New England archives, logbooks of U.S. whaling voyages contain systematic weather observations (e.g., wind strength/direction, sea state, precipitation) at (sub-)daily temporal resolution. Here, qualitative wind descriptions by the whalers from ~200 ship logbooks are quantified to generate a dataset with ~81,000 daily records of wind strength and direction en route and covering key whaling grounds in the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Southern Ocean during the period 1820–1900 CE. Following extensive quality control, we find good agreement in wind strength and direction for the whaling records when compared with 20th Century Reanalysis winds for mean and seasonal conditions. For the North Atlantic with the densest coverage of whaling records, interannual variations in the basin-wide wind field associated with different phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation are also captured in the whaling records. Our results demonstrate that the historical records provide an important long-term context for maritime wind patterns in ocean regions lacking direct observational data during the 19th century.