The Spanish American record as a climate archive

Three centuries of Spanish record-keeping in the Americas are now read as data by climate science. Over 300,000 early instrumental weather observations have been recovered from twenty countries, beginning with Lima in 1754, and 656 Spanish Caribbean shipwrecks, normalised against fleet departures counted in the Archivo General de Indias, have been used to reconstruct hurricane activity back to 1495. The same literature states what the archive cannot do.