Yeah, I know, historical fiction writers are nerds at heart. So I was delighted to find this listing of what-the-weather-was from the Stone Age to now, and year-by-year and even month-by-month for nearer to our own times.

Weather History

Emma

How on earth did they accumulate so much information from before BC? - geographical studies, i suppose.

"And today there will be rapid peat-bog growth, several volcanic eruptions and poor glacial development."

OOh, doesn't this make today's forecasts sound boring....

Sammy

I'm definitely a bit of a nerd and loved this! Very helpful too, for background info in fiction. Thanks for that, Emma.

absoutely facinating! thanks for posting that.

Oh wow, I didn't even know I was a nerd but I loved this and will definitely use it for my current novel.

Proud New Nerd Myrtle

Glad to oblige, oh fellow nerds old and new. I'm feeling particularly pleased with the site at the moment, as it's obliged with a notably hot summer just the year that I needed one...

Emma

Coo! Nice one Emma, thanks for posting this. I am off to look at what the weather was like at the end of August 1888.

'Polly' Nichols, Jack the Ripper's first victim was murdered on the morning of August 31st 1888.

Best

John

<Added>

Bummer!

I was hoping for a warm night and it was apparently a cold summer.

Hey ho

J

Emma, this is brilliant! Well done for finding it. What a fantastic resource.

Roger

You're welcome, guys. The thing that always staggers me, in a grateful sort of way, is that there are heroic souls who put this kind of site together for the sheer love of it...

Emma

Does it matter, do you think, if you've set your book in, say, 1973 and described it as being an unusually cold winter, but it turns out that in fact it was the warmest winter on record? What do people think? I'm saying not, because most people won't remember, and anyway, it's poetic licence, innit?

Within limits you can do whatever you like, of course. But I always check roughly, just in case there was a hurricane that devasted the whole of S E England, say. I used to reckon that if the weather didn't make it into Dorling Kindersley's nerd-heaven, 20th Century Day-by-Day, then I didn't need to worry, but this site makes it easier!

More to the point, checking can trigger the sort of serendipitous discovery that turns out really fruitful. I set half of TMOL in 1976 purely because I needed two of the older characters to have met when young in the Spanish Civil War. Then someone said, 'Oh, 1976, the very hot summer,' which I'd forgotten about. In the end, the heat, and the progress of the season, with cornfields very ripe and pale, then being cut, then stubble burning, turned out to be a really important element of the novel, and one that readers have since picked up on a lot.

Emma