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 19^th 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 20^th 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 19^th century.