Over the last few centuries, conditions for human habitation have dramatically changed. The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, sea levels have risen and the amount of snow and ice has dropped around the world and the Arctic is a global ‘hot point’ that is heating up faster than any other region in the world (IPCC 2013). The Arctic plays a key role in the shaping of the climate at lower latitudes (Serreze and Barry 2014; Przybylak 2016; Przybylak and Wyszyński 2017). The Arctic (more precisely, the Arctic circle), where the impact of cold and wind is a daily risk, is home to more than 4 million people (e.g. Gavhed 2003; ACIA 2005; Araźny 2008; Maciejczyk et al. 2017).

The oldest instrumental meteorological data from Franz Josef Land (FJL) were collected during an expedition led by Luigi Amadeo di Savoia (wintering at Teplitz Bay in 1899/1900) (Cagni 1903), Anthony Fiala (Teplitz Bay, 1903/1904) (Peters and Fleming 1907), Georgiy Yakovlevich Sedov (Calm Bay, 1913/1914) (Vise 1933) and by the Section for Polar and High Altitude Observations of the Central Geophysical Observatory in St Petersburg (Calm Bay, 1930/1931) (Lvov 1933). Many works exist that describe the history of discoveries on FJL and the course of exploratory expeditions in the region (e.g. Capelotti 2009, 2016), but daily and sub-daily resolution data gathered during those expeditions have thus far not been subjected to detailed study. The exceptions are the works of Przybylak et al. (2010, 2013), which analysed only monthly air temperature and atmospheric pressure values on FJL in the historical periods, i.e. in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

The present paper describes the meteorological and biometeorological conditions at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century during the expeditions cited above and then compares them with the contemporary period. It uses meteorological data from the Ostrov Heisa meteorological station for 1981–2010 (http://meteo.ru/). The climatic conditions for the last several decades in FJL have been thoroughly investigated (e.g. Hisdal 1995; Przybylak 2016; Shilovtseva and Romanenko 2016). However, there is a lack of information about the meteorological and biometeorological conditions for earlier periods. One of the first works to describe the biometeorological conditions of the Arctic in the historical period is the article by Araźny (2010). In it, the author presents the spatial biometeorological conditions for the entire Arctic but only during the First International Polar Year, 1882/83. The present article aims to present the biometeorological conditions at a regional scale, focusing on their changes over time, i.e. from the historical period spanning the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, including the years of the Early Twentieth Century Warming (ETCW) to the modern period (1981–2010).

1.1 Area, data and methods

Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, FJL was an unknown territory. It was discovered during attempts to find the Northeast Passage. In the years 1872–4, this area was discovered and initially investigated by an Austro-Hungarian expedition led by Weyprecht and Payer (Williams 2005).

The FJL archipelago is located in the northwest of the Barents Sea (Fig. 1). The archipelago is comprised of 191 islands with a combined area of 16,135 km². FJL is located between 79° 46′ and 81° 52’ N and 44° 52′ and 65° 25′ E and stretches 375 km from west to east and 234 km from south to north. At 81° N, the period in which the sun (the whole solar disc) remains continuously above the horizon (midnight sun) starts on about 12th April and ends around 30th August, i.e. 141 days in all. The period in which the whole solar disc is continuously below the horizon (polar night) lasts from about 19th October to about 23rd February or 128 days in all (Hisdal 1995). Widespread glaciers predominate in the archipelago, covering 85% of the total land area (e.g. Grosswald et al. 1973; Glazovskij 1995). Most glaciers end in cliffs in the waters of straits and fjords. The summits of many large ice caps lie at around 500 m a.s.l. (metres above sea level), with the highest at about 650 m a.s.l. (Grosswald et al. 1973; Lubinski et al. 1999).

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To assess meteorological and biometeorological conditions, average diurnal values were used. They were calculated on the basis of fixed hour values (Table 1). Data from four historical expeditions (Teplitz Bay, 1899/1900; Teplitz Bay, 1903/1904; Calm Bay, 1913/1914 and Calm Bay, 1930/1931) were transcribed from source materials (see Table 1) and digitised for the present paper. Such an approach guarantees the lowest error rates when acquiring data from antique books and prints (Brönnimann et al. 2006). All outliers were checked and suspect ones removed after inspection from the data set, similarly as was done for other studies (Przybylak et al. 2010, 2016; Przybylak and Wyszyński 2017). The rest were quality controlled by the national Russian meteorological service before being published. The locations of sites for which meteorological and biometeorological data are available, and their time coverage are shown in Table 1. The state of completeness of the historical meteorological data led to the October–April period (hereafter winter) being selected. On average, this period has the lowest air temperatures in the course of a year.

Table 1

Geographic location of historical and present-day stations in Franz Josef Land. Temporal usage, resolution and sources of raw data for wind speed (V), air temperature (T) and relative air humidity (RH)

Station	Latitude	Longitude	Station elevation (m a.s.l.)	Temporal data usage	Source of data	V (m s−1)	T (°C)	RH (%)
Teplitz Bay	81.78° N	58.07° E	4.1	1899.08.01–1900.08.31	Cagni 1903	h	h	h
Teplitz Bay	81.78° N	58.07° E	9.3	1903.09.01–1904.04.30	Peters and Fleming 1907	8, 12, 20 LMT	8, 12, 20 LMT	–
Calm Bay (Buhta Tikhaya)	80.32° N	52.80° E	5.9	1913.09.01–1914.07.31	Vise 1933	2 h	h	2 h
Calm Bay (Buhta Tikhaya)	80.32° N	52.80° E	5.9	1930.08.01–1931.07.31	Lvov 1933	7, 13, 21 LMT	h	h
Ostrov Heisa	80.62° N	58.05° E	20.0	1981.01.01–2010.12.31	RIHMI-WDC, http://meteo.ru	t	t	t

h, every hour; 2 h, every 2 h (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22 LMT); t, six times a day (0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 12, 15, 18, 21 LMT); RIHMI-WDC, All-Russia Research Institute of Hydrometeorological Information—World Data Centre

To explain the general meteorological conditions during the analysed four historical periods (Table 1) in the FJL area, the distribution of atmospheric pressure patterns and atmospheric circulation were analysed on the basis of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project (20CRv2c, Compo et al. 2011).

Meteorological conditions are presented using air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed, which are essential for calculating the biometeorological indices proposed in the paper. The analysis of both meteorological and biometeorological conditions was performed using standard methods used in climatology (Gregory 1973) and bioclimatology (Błażejczyk and Kunert 2011).

Apparent conditions are presented using three biometeorological indices: wind chill temperature (WCT); insulation predicted (Iclp), which measures the predicted insulating value of clothing; and accepted level of physical activity (MHR). These indices were calculated using BioKlima 2.6 software (Błażejczyk 2017).

For calculation of biometeorological indices (Iclp and MHR) on FJL, wind speeds were reduced from the measurement height above ground level to the height of the human torso. The International Society of Biometeorology recommends the standard height of 1.2 m (Błażejczyk and Kunert 2011). Iclp and MHR were calculated for the wind at 1.2 m above the ground. Calculations were made according to Milewskij (1960):

Vz=Vw(hz/hw)0.2

From the end of the nineteenth century, air temperature increased more sharply in the Arctic that elsewhere on Earth (e.g. Budyko 1974; Przybylak 2000, 2007, 2016; Alekseev 2003; Overland et al. 2004; IPCC 2013). For example, Svalbard (land data) in the period 1865–1920 was markedly colder than nowadays (1981–2010) by about 3 °C (Przybylak et al. 2016). In approximately the last 140 years, there have been two periods of significant temperature increases in the Arctic. The first began in around 1918–1920 and lasted until 1938 and has been called the ‘1930s warming’ (Bengtsson et al. 2004). Other works have referred to this period as the ‘Early Twentieth Century Warming’ (ETCW, Brönnimann 2009) or the ‘Early Twentieth Century Arctic Warming’ (ETCAW, Wegmann et al. 2017, 2018). Our results confirm the observations for the last expedition from the historical study period in 1930/1931. These years covered the warmest part of the ETCW (Table 3, Fig. 4). In turn, the second increased warming of the Arctic began around 1980 (Johannessen et al. 2004) or according to Przybylak (2007) in about the mid-1990s. Changes in overall atmospheric circulation have long been believed to have been the cause of the ETCW (e.g. Scherhag 1937). As the modern climate warming (since 1975) has progressed in a largely similar manner to the progression of the ETCW (Wood and Overland 2010; Semenov and Latif 2012), there has been renewed interest in the insufficiently well-explained causes of the ETCW using the latest research methods, including, primarily, climate models. An analysis of the literature shows that the cause of such a significant warming in the present period is still not clear. There is even controversy over whether the main factors in the process are natural or anthropogenic, although the decided majority of researchers assign a greater role to natural factors (Bengtsson et al. 2004; Semenov and Latif 2012). It would appear that the greatest differences of opinion on the causes of the ETCW are to be found in works presenting climate models (see, e.g. Shiogama et al. 2006; Suo et al. 2013), which is an excellent illustration of the still-insufficient knowledge of the mechanisms governing the Arctic Climate System.

Compared to the data for air temperature, there are significantly fewer reliable data available for air humidity, wind speed and wind direction for the historical period (the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century). This is because of, among other things, the significant influence that wind measurements have on local conditions and difficulties involved in taking reliable measurements of air humidity (Vizi 2008; Wyszyński and Przybylak 2014). In addressing the issue of wind directions and velocity in the Canadian Arctic in the mid-nineteenth century, Vizi (2008) found that they depend heavily on local conditions (ships most often chose secluded places deep in fjords or bays to winter). According to that author, this makes it impossible to reliably know what anemological conditions are representative for this area. Meanwhile, Wyszyński and Przybylak (2014) stated that ‘the literature does not offer any detailed studies of the humidity of air in the Arctic during the early instrumental times, due to the fact that it was extremely difficult to take reliable measurements of atmospheric humidity in the polar regions with negative air temperatures prevailing most of the year’. Recent years have brought no new studies on this matter to add to those mentioned above. Wyszyński and Przybylak (2014) presented the most complete work on hygrometric conditions (water vapour pressure and relative humidity) for the entire Arctic in the historical period, but this was based only on data collected during the 1st International Polar Year 1882/1883. In that year (September 1882–July 1883), it was calculated that the relative humidity was on average about 2–6% higher than nowadays. The measurement difficulties related to air humidity have meant that the empirical data for this element that were collected during four polar expeditions from the historical period and used in this article contain many gaps (Table 5). In the Arctic in the modern period, WCT has only been analysed at higher latitudes of North America (Keimig and Bradley 2002; Mekis et al. 2015; Howarth and Laird 2017) and in the Norwegian Arctic (Araźny 2008). The results of these studies in the Arctic confirm that WCT values towards the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century have been systematically increasing, which indicates greater apparent warmth for humans. However, WCT has not yet been analysed for historical times in the Arctic area.

For the Arctic area in the historical period, synthetic information about Iclp is only available for the first IPY period (Araźny 2010). A comparison of the historical period (1882–83) against the period 1971–2000 has only been made for the Jan Mayen station (Spitsbergen). During the first IPY, the thermal insulation properties of clothing for a person in motion had to be 0.1 clo higher than they were at the end of the twentieth century. In terms of the demand for clothing with optimal insulation properties for a person in motion during the first MRP in, for example the winter months, heavy Arctic clothing was required (Araźny 2010). In the Arctic, Iclp has only been analysed in the Atlantic region for 1971–2000 by Araźny (2006, 2008). He concluded a gradual decrease in the required clothing insulation in the Norwegian Arctic in the study period.

To calculate MHR alongside thermal conditions, information about air humidity is necessary, which is difficult to find and often not complete in the historical periods. This index has not been analysed thus far for historical times in the Arctic.

Currently, analyses of biometeorological conditions present the real human physiological processes and loads experienced in various environments. These employ human heat balance models which describe all the complex mechanisms of the mechanisms of heat transfer and heat exchange of the human body (Błażejczyk 2003, 2004). These models have been used to create, for example a new index, Universal Thermal Climate Index—UTCI (Błażejczyk et al. 2012). In the current research, these tools could not be used because the required input data, including solar radiation and cloudiness values, were not available. The availability of meteorological data for the historical period allows biometeorological indices mainly based on air temperature and wind speed (e.g. WCT and Iclp) to be calculated.

The data analyses for FJL during the three oldest expeditions (1899–1914) lead us to conclude that the biometeorological conditions in the study area were more harsh to humans than in the modern period (1981–2010) or similarly harsh. In contrast, during the 1930/1931 expedition (the last analysed period), in the ETCW, conditions were clearly more favourable.

This article is one of the first in the literature to present an analysis of biometeorological conditions in the Arctic in historical periods. The Department of Meteorology and Climatology of Nicolaus Copernicus University has a sizeable database of early instrumental data for the Arctic region, the Historical Arctic Database (HARD 2.0, http://www.hardv2.prac.umk.pl/), and work on climate reconstructions of the region is ongoing. This line of application of the data, i.e. the historical bioclimatology of the Arctic, will continue to be developed in the near future.