Climate of the Past www.clim-past.net 1814-9324 1814-9332 6 3 2010 10.5194/cp-6-315-2010 http://www.clim-past.net/6/315/2010/ http://www.clim-past.net/6/315/2010/cp-6-315-2010.html http://www.clim-past.net/6/315/2010/cp-6-315-2010.pdf 315 324 2010-05-21 Arctic marine climate of the early nineteenth century P. Brohan philip.brohan@metoffice.gov.uk C. Ward G. Willetts C. Wilkinson R. Allan D. Wheeler Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK Sunderland University, Sunderland, UK University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK The climate of the early nineteenth century is likely to have been significantly cooler than that of today, as it was a period of low solar activity (the Dalton minimum) and followed a series of large volcanic eruptions. Proxy reconstructions of the temperature of the period do not agree well on the size of the temperature change, so other observational records from the period are particularly valuable. 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