Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description of the weather in The Long Winter is a good bridge between the many readers of the beloved historic fiction series and climate science, says Barbara Mayes Boustead, a Ph.D. student at UNL’s School of Natural Resources. Boustead found historic data to verify Wilder’s account of the winter of 1880-81, and her work was featured in USA Today on Monday, August 22.
“The communication of the science is just as important as the science,” said Boustead, who is also a National Weather Service meteorologist and climatologist. “I want to show that a scientist can do this type of research and also communicate it effectively. Connecting it to a book like The Long Winter allows me to reach a wider audience that isn’t necessarily interested in weather.”
Talking about weather in historic children’s literature is a safe entry point for a broader discussion on climate and weather patterns, such as the idea that the climate may be warming. “We’d be hard-pressed to find a winter that lasts six months, even given an El Niño and a strongly negative North Atlantic Oscillation,” which were the prevailing patterns in 1880-81, Boustead said. The same conditions existed in 2009-2010, and while we did have dramatic cold and snow, it didn’t last as long.
Boustead presented a preliminary paper on her research, Laura’s Long Winter: Putting the Hard Winter of 1880-81 into Perspective, in July at the American Meteorological Society’s 19th Conference on Applied Climatology.
Boustead’s research specialty is climate assessment and impacts, and her dissertation topic is “building a historical weather and climate narrative.” She is supervised by High Plains Regional Climate Center climatologists Martha Shulski, director, and Ken Hubbard, senior scientist.
Boustead credits her mother with her longstanding interest in the Wilder books. “My mom gave me my first one when I was six. I rolled my eyes but I read them, several times, and continue to read them as an adult.”
Boustead provides an ongoing account of her research in her blog, Wilder Weather.
Source: Barbara Mayes Boustead, barbara.mayes@noaa.gov
Writer: Kelly Helm Smith, UNL School of Natural Resources, 402-472-3373, ksmith2@unl.edu
