the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 01 Jul 2026
Strong winds in Poland in the 17th century and their consequences, in light of documentary evidence
Abstract. The paper presents a detailed analysis of strong winds in Poland in the 17th century, including their frequency, intensity, and impacts on the natural environment, society and economy. The analysis is solely based on available documentary evidence. Preliminary archival research allowed the construction of a comprehensive database of strong winds for Poland for the study period. The 542 weather notes were used to obtain the following information about strong winds: time, location/region, duration, and indexations of intensity, extent, and damage character. For the first time, 14 years of complete daily weather data were used to analyse the occurrence of strong winds. The methodology follows that utilised by Przybylak et al. (2025) for the analysis of strong winds prior to the 17th century. The number of strong winds in Poland in the 17th century reached 525, with the majority occurring in the second half of the century. In the annual cycle, strong winds were less frequent in summer, whereas the other seasons had similar frequencies. The wind category “fresh and strong breeze” occurred the most frequently (61.9 %), followed by “gales” (26.7 %). The former category dominated in spring and autumn (58.8 %), whereas the latter prevailed in the cold half-year (65 %). Each category of strong wind occurred more commonly in northern and north-eastern Poland than anywhere else. In 13.5 % of reports of strong winds, information about damage was available – most frequently in winter and autumn and least frequently in spring. The most frequently reported damage and destruction involved buildings (residential, agricultural, churches, etc.) and forests. The availability of daily-resolution data significantly improved the reliability of results on strong wind occurrence, particularly for the mildest analysed category (fresh and strong breeze). The changes in frequency of strong wind events in Poland in the 17th century were more similar to those observed in Northern than Southern Europe.
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Status: open (until 26 Aug 2026)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-3524', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 Jul 2026 reply
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-3524', Anonymous Referee #2, 21 Jul 2026
reply
This review is divided into three sections, namely, general comments, specific comments and technical comments.
General Comments:
This manuscript reconstructs the occurrence of strong winds in Poland during the 17th century based on historical documentary sources. As strong winds are among the most destructive natural hazards in Poland and are projected to increase in frequency and intensity under future climate change, studies on pre-modern wind events are both valuable and timely. However, compared with the previous publication (Przybylak et al., 2025), the present manuscript shows only limited novelty. Apart from extending the study period to the 17th century, the research framework, methodology, and overall content remain largely unchanged. In addition, several methodological issues require clarification. Therefore, I recommend major revision before the manuscript can be considered for publication.
Specific Comments
- Extraction and use of historical documentary sources
①The manuscript introduces several types of historical sources, including handwritten and unpublished sources, published sources, and Diary. As noted in the manuscript, data quality and characteristics vary significantly across document types. It remains unclear whether different research questions use distinct source subsets, or if a formal data fusion process was implemented during extraction. The data processing workflow should be described more explicitly.
Lines 183–184 state that "we primarily used the last category of sources for the analysis, as it provided the most valuable and reliable information." Does this imply that only the third category of sources was used, while others were discarded? That causes considerable confusion regarding the role of the other data sources.
②In practice, the manuscript employs different datasets for different analyses (e.g., long-term reconstruction versus case studies). A schematic research framework illustrating the relationships among data sources, research questions, and analytical methods would greatly improve the clarity of the paper.
- Methodology
The classification of strong winds into five categories based on historical documentary evidence is one of the most innovative aspects of the manuscript. However, the connection between this historical classification and modern meteorological terminology requires further clarification. Line 316 state that "many of them in historical time were undetectable." The manuscript should clarify how historical terminologies are systematically connected to contemporary meteorological standards. For instance, are weather terms such as "gales," "storms," and "squalls" (as shown in Figures 15 and 16) classified using the same criteria in both historical contexts and modern observations?
- Discussion and Conclusions
The Discussion section covers a wide range of points but lacks sufficient depth and focus. Key aspects—such as the broader climatic context, the underlying causes of regional disparities, and validation from neighboring countries—require stronger supporting evidence and more rigorous comparative analysis.
Technical comments
①Given the strong conceptual and methodological overlap with Przybylak et al. (2025), both the Introduction and Discussion sections must explicitly highlight the unique scientific value and necessity of focusing specifically on the 17th century.
②It is unclear whether Diary are included in the handwritten and unpublished sources, or whether they constitute an independent source category.
③It is unclear how the numbers of strong-wind events reported in Table 3 were calculated.
④The relationship between the database and the Diary is not sufficiently clear. Does the database include diary records, or are these two independent datasets? The manuscript should clarify the composition of the database.
⑤The Abstract should be revised to better highlight the novelty of the study and summarize its major findings.
⑥The manuscript contains two methodological sections ("Area, Data and Methods" and "Method"). Although these sections serve different purposes, organizing the methodology into two separate sections is uncommon in journal articles.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3524-RC2 -
RC3: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-3524', Anonymous Referee #3, 31 Jul 2026
reply
In my opinion, this manuscript constitutes a valuable and potentially important contribution to European historical climatology, especially due to the considerable work of recovering, critiquing, and systematizing documentary sources carried out by the authors. The construction of a database with 542 entries and 525 episodes of strong wind, supplemented by 14 years of complete daily observations, provides exceptional information on a phenomenon scarcely studied in 17th-century Poland and allows for the analysis of its seasonality, regional distribution, intensity, and effects on buildings, forests, and society.
However, its main weakness lies in the fact that the availability, resolution, and reliability of the sources vary substantially throughout the century, meaning that the reconstructed frequencies may reflect both meteorological variability and changes in documentary coverage. This problem does not invalidate the study, but it does require a clearer distinction between the general inventory of the century, the periods with daily information, the case studies, and the records of varying quality. Furthermore, it should be explained more reproducibly how historical expressions such as "gale," "storm," or "squall" are transformed into the five intensity categories and to what extent these can be compared with modern instrumental observations. The novelty compared to the work of Przybylak et al. (2025) should also be better defined: it lies not so much in a new methodology as in the chronological expansion of the database, the incorporation of daily series, and the analysis of new historical evidence. In short, I consider it a solid manuscript, original in its sources and worthy of publication, but it needs a significant methodological revision, an explicit assessment of documentary bias, and more cautious conclusions, referring to "documented episodes during the 17th century" and not to the homogeneous climatic behavior of the century as a whole.
The main weaknesses that I find in this manuscript are the following:
A. Event frequency is confounded with source availability. This is the most important weakness. The statement that most reconstructed events occurred in the second half of the century may reflect some combination of actual meteorological variability, more surviving sources, higher temporal resolution, the emergence of daily observations, geographical differences between observers and preferential documentation of damaging events. Unless documentary coverage is quantified, a graph of event counts may partly be a graph of source density. The manuscript should avoid treating raw counts as direct climatic frequencies without an explicit correction, sensitivity analysis or strong qualification.
B. The different analytical datasets are not sufficiently separated. The manuscript appears to combine or alternate among different sub-databases. Each subset answers a different question. Presently, the boundary between them is not always obvious.
C. The classification system is not reproducible enough. A reader needs a decision protocol showing how a documentary description becomes one of the five intensity categories.
For example, classification could depend on the historical wind term, movement or destruction of objects, damage to buildings, uprooting of tres, effects on ships or water bodies, duration, spatial extent or an explicit contemporary comparison. If these indicators disagree, the manuscript should state which takes precedence. Author can see a remakable example in the CLIWOC dictionary (García-Herrera, R., Prieto, L., Gallego, D., Hernández, E., Gimeno, L., Können, G.P., Koek, F.B., Wheeler, D.A., Wilkinson, C., Prieto, M.R., Báez, C. and Woodruff, S. (2003): CLIWOC multilingual meteorological dictionary , EU contract EVK2-CT-2000-00090; García-Herrera, R., Können, G.P., Wheeler, D.A. et al. CLIWOC: A Climatological Database for the World's Oceans 1750–1854. Climatic Change 73, 1–12 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-005-6952-6).D. Risk of circularity between intensity and damage. If damage is used to assign wind intensity and the paper later analyses damage by intensity category, the two variables are not independent. The authors need to make clear whether intensity classification was derived independently of the damage variable.
E. Insufficient treatment of uncertainty. The three-level source-quality score is useful, but it is not the same as uncertainty in event date, event location, event duration, intensity, event identity, translation, or meteorological interpretation. A high-quality contemporary source may still use ambiguous terminology. Conversely, a later source may preserve a precise description. Separate confidence fields would improve the analysis.
F. Modern comparison may suggest greater comparability than exists. Historical observers and modern stations do not share the same instruments, exposure, sampling frequency, terminology, and so on. Thus, the modern comparison is defensible as a contextual or calibration exercise, but not necessarily as a direct comparison of climatological frequencies.
G. Novelty is not articulated clearly. Because the methodology deliberately follows the earlier paper, the novelty must be presented as new evidence, improved temporal resolution, new historical sources and new substantive findings. Without that framing, the manuscript can look like the previous analysis shifted forward by one century.
H. The Discussion is broad but not sufficiently analytical. The Discussion would benefit from organising itself around three or four testable questions, rather than reviewing numerous possible explanations.
I. Terminology and grammar occasionally overstate the scope. Expressions such as “strong winds in Poland in the seventeenth century” are acceptable as a topic label, but conclusions should preferably use formulations such as: (i) “documented strong-wind events during the seventeenth century”; (ii) “the available seventeenth-century evidence”; (iii) “the analysed documentary record”; (iv) or, where appropriate, “selected periods of the later seventeenth century.” This would avoid implying complete and homogeneous century-long observation.
My main proposals to the authors are:
1. The single most effective improvement: add a source-to-result audit framework. I would recommend adding both a workflow figure and an accompanying dataset table.
2. Reframe the title cautiously.A possible title would be: "Documented strong winds in seventeenth-century Poland and their consequences: evidence from historical sources". “Documented” immediately signals that the study analyses the surviving record, not a homogeneous instrumental climatology.
3. Add a documentary-coverage figure. For each year, show: (i) number of sources available; (ii) number of days covered by daily records; (iii) number of wind-related notes; (iv) number of accepted events; and (v) proportion of records in each quality class. This could reveal whether peaks in reconstructed events coincide with peaks in source availability.
4. Moderate causal interpretations. The Maunder Minimum and Little Ice Age provide important climatic context, but the manuscript should not imply that low solar activity directly explains the reconstructed wind patterns unless an atmospheric mechanism is tested. Temporal coincidence is not sufficient. Note that the Maunder minimum is not properly cited (J. Eddy, 1976 "The Maunder Minimum" Science 192, Issue 4245, pp. 1189-1202, DOI: 10.1126/science.192.4245.118; I. G. Usoskin et al., 2015, "The Maunder Minimum (1645–1715) was indeed a grand minimum: A reassessment of multiple datasets" A&A, 581 (2015) A95, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201526652).
5. Reorganise the paper. A clearer structure would be: (i) Introduction, (ii) Study área, (iii) Documentary sources, (iv) Data construction and source criticism, (v) Wind classification and analytical methods, (vi) Results, (vii) Discussion and (viii) Conclusions.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3524-RC3
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This is a carefully written and detailed analysis of wind frequency and strength in 17th century Poland, and area and time for which few studies and limited data exist. The authors are experts in the field, having worked through several centuries of data recovery and analysis and, having presented work in this area before. The reasons as to why only wind data has been analysed are sound. I have no particular comments on the analysis and methods itself.
My two main points are broader.
One final pedantic point, page 1, lines 41-2 note that strong winds are among the most significant natural disasters. This seems a particularly European perspective. Are tropical cyclones/typhoons included in this? If not, where is the point of differentiation?