HISTALP HISTORY: 2002-2007

Systematic implementation of HISTALP

Two further projects helped to systematically develop the data collection named HISTALP – Historical Instrumental Climatological Surface Time Series of the Greater Alpine Region – of instrumental climate information in the GAR.
Within the project CLIVALP (Climate Variability Studies in the Alpine Region, P 15076-N06, 2002-2005) funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) the dataset was structured by creating the HISTALP database. Moreover a revised programme collection for data handling, homogenising, gap completing and outlier detecting/eliminating was produced.
A thematic widening from the instrumental domain towards proxy-data and a deeper implementation of HISTALP into the international research community was achieved 2003-2006 within EU-project ALP-IMP (Multi-centennial climate variability in the Alps based on Instrumental data, Model simulations and Proxy data, EVK-CT-2002-00148).

Both projects, CLIVALP and HISTALP cooperated closely and produced a rich harvest of publications which describe and/or analyse HISTALP data - the latter being performed exclusively as well as partly based on HISTALP data:

Auer et al., 2007 resumed and extensively and systematically described the dataset. It is regarded the basic reference publication of the dataset. It concentrates on three datamodes: station-mode (original and homogenised for all so far existing 7 climate elements), grid-mode-1 (anomaly series of temperature, precipitation and air pressure at a grid size of 1°lat-long respectively) and CRSM-mode (coarse resolution subregional means - anomaly series of all 7 climate elements as spatial means of 5 principal subregions of the GAR objectively detected via PCA). Statmap-2 shows the coarsely regionalised GAR together with the station network achieved by the end of 2006. Statnet-development gives the temporal evolution of the HISTALP network.

A number of papers (Auer et al., 2003, Ungersböck et al., 2003, Scheifinger et al., 2003, Böhm, 2004, Auer et al., 2004, Hiebl, 2006) concentrated on technical topics in respect to data homogeneity. Auer et al., 2005a did so exemplarily for the precipitation subset and Efthymiadis et al., 2006 further developed the precipitation dataset to the most developed grid-mode-2 datamode envisaged for the monthly HISTALP-data: Gridded absolute data at the highest spatial resolution adequate to the necessities and the given spatial variability of the given climate element. For monthly totals of precipitation we chose a spatial resolution of 1/6th of a degree lat-long. Van der Schrier et al., 2007 added another parameter at grid-2 mode to the HISTALP list: soil moisture derived from HISTALP elements and described by the “self calibrating Palmer drought severity index” adapted to the alpine region through the inclusion of a snow melt model and through the use of the high grid-2 resolution. 

First analyses on HISTALP data were published by Wanner et al., 2003, Auer et al., 2003b, Böhm et al., 2003, Auer et al., 2005b, Brunetti et al., 2006, Böhm, 2006, Efthymiadis et al., 2007, Böhm and Auer, 2007.
Matulla et al., 2005 comparatively co-analysed HISTALP-series with respective historic model runs.
A greater number of papers used the new datasource for calibration of and/or co-analysis with documentary or natural climate proxies. HISTALP-data were included in the 500-years temperature and precipitation reconstruction of Casty et al. 2005 .
Vincent et al., 2005, Schöner and Böhm., 2007, Zemp et al., 2006, Zemp et al., 2007 combined instrumental HISTALP evidence with glacier studies.
Since the early 1990 a longterm and ongoing tradition exists in applications of HISTALP-series in studies at Alpine lakes with the limnology groups of the University of Innsbruck and of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Mondsee. Psenner and Schmidt, 1992, Sommaruga et al, 1997, Koinig et al, 1998a, Koinig et al, 1998b, Koinig et al, 2002 focus on climate influences on biological processes in remote high-alpine lakes in general and on acidity-temperature correlations in particular.
Intensively used have been and still are HISTALP data by the tree-ring community. 11 respective papers appeared from 2005-2007: Wilson et al., 2005, Nicolussi et al., 2005, Frank et al., 2005, Büntgen et al., 2005, Frank and Esper, 2005a, Frank and Esper, 2005b, Carrer and Urbinati, 2006, Büntgen et al., 2006a, Büntgen et al., 2006b, Leal et al., 2007 and Frank et al., 2007.

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