Observations and Measurements of Precipitation in the Polish Province of Galicia in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The paper discusses nineteenth century visual and instrumental records of precipitation collected in those Polish territories falling in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia during the Hapsburg partition (1795–1918). Most attention is devoted to the observations and output of the weather station in the Astronomical Observatory of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, which was the central station of several networks of weather stations and precipitation posts established during the second half of the nineteenth century. The station’s history dates back to 1 May 1792, when observations started at the initiative of the eminent scientist Jan Śniadecki. Initially, observations of precipitation were only visual. Daily observation logs were used to record the occurrence, type and intensity (drizzle, rain, rainstorm, thunderstorm, etc.) of precipitation events. Instrumental measurements of rain only started in August 1849, that is long after the first instrumental measurements of precipitation in southern Poland began in Lvov in 1811. In 1886, Professor F. Karliński, head of the Astronomical Observatory, initiated pluviographic measurements in Cracow and these were first published in 1893. In the light of observations made in Cracow, high precipitation frequencies were noted in the 1830s and 1840s. Lower frequencies of precipitation, across all seasons, were recorded in the 1810s and 1820s. The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by a clearly lower degree of variation of precipitation days from year to year.