Climate of the Past www.clim-past.net 1814-9324 1814-9332 4 1 2008 10.5194/cp-4-11-2008 http://www.clim-past.net/4/11/2008/ http://www.clim-past.net/4/11/2008/cp-4-11-2008.html http://www.clim-past.net/4/11/2008/cp-4-11-2008.pdf 11 18 2008-02-06 On the quality of climate proxies derived from newspaper reports – a case study D. Gallego R. García-Herrera R. Prieto C. Peña-Ortiz Dpto. de Sistemas Físicos, Químicos y Naturales. Universidad Pablo de Olavide. Ctra. de Utrera Km 1, 41013 Sevilla, Spain Departamento de Física de la Tierra, Astronomía y Astrofísica II, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, Spain CRICYT Instituto de Nivología, Glaciología y Ciencias Ambientales (IANIGLA), Calle Bajada del Cerro s/n, Parque Gral. San Martín, Mendoza, Argentina One of the main problems in climate reconstruction from documentary sources is the evaluation of the quality of non instrumental meteorological records in absence of instrumental observations to perform a calibration. In these cases it is mandatory to envision different approaches to assess the climatic signal in a reconstruction. This work is aimed to test the consistency of a snow frequency reconstruction in the central Argentinean Andes by studying the synoptic patterns related to the occurrence of precipitation in this area. While the original reconstruction covers the period between 1885 and 1996, the insufficiency of overlapping instrumental data limited the calibration to a short 15-year interval. 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