Reconstruction of past storminess and storm track position, evidence from Pedrido Bog, Galicia, Spain

Over annual to decadal timescales changes in the storm track influences regional climate in Europe, however little is known about how the storm track varies over centennial and millennial timescales. We here present two datasets. The first is a reconstruction of storminess from northwest Spain spanning the period 4600-0 cal yrs BP, which was developed by measuring aeolian sand deposits in a peat core from Pedrido Bog, Galicia, Spain. Samples of equal volume (5 cm3) from 1 cm contiguous intervals along the core were processed using the loss-on-ignition method (Heiri et al. 2001), leaving the ignition residue, which was sieved to establish the weight of the 120-180 and >180 micron sand fractions. The ignition residue and sand fractions reflect the past amount of sand deposition, which can be used as proxies for storminess. The second dataset is a North-South storm track index reconstruction for western Europe spanning the period 3940-120 cal yrs BP. To create the storm track index, the above described storminess record from Spain was subtracted from a storminess record from Scotland, derived by averaging the results of two storminess reconstructions from the Outer Hebrides, Scotland (Orme et al., 2016). Each record was sampled to the same 20 year temporal resolution and standardised prior to this.