ORIGINAL PAPER A comparison of bioclimatic conditions on Franz Josef Land (the Arctic) between the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century and present day Andrzej Araźny 1 & Przemysław Wyszyński 1 & Rajmund Przybylak 1 Received: 21 May 2018 /Accepted: 21 December 2018 /Published online: 10 January 2019 # The Author(s) 2019 Abstract The paper presents the variability of meteorological conditions: air temperature, wind speed and relative air humidity; and biometeorological indices: wind chill temperature, predicted clothing insulation and accepted level of physical activity on Franz Josef Land (in Teplitz Bay and Calm Bay) in the years 1899–1931. It employs meteorological measurements taken during four scientific expeditions to the study area. The analysis mainly covered the period October–April, for which the most complete data set is available. For that period of the year, which includes the part of the year with the Franz Josef Land’ s coldest air temperatures, the range and nature of changes in meteorological and biometeorological conditions between historical periods and the modern period (1981–2010) were studied. The data analysis revealed that during the three oldest expeditions (which took place in the years 1899–1914), 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, which represents the Early Twentieth Century Warming (ETCW), conditions were clearly more favourable (including predicted clothing insulation being 0.3 clo lower and 4.0 °C higher wind chill temperature than conditions observed nowadays). 1 Introduction 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 expedi- tions 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 biome- teorological conditions at the turn of the nineteenth to twenti- eth century during the expeditions cited above and then com- pares them with the contemporary period. It uses meteorolog- ical 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 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-018-02763-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Andrzej Araźny andy@umk.pl 1 Department of Meteorology and Climatology, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Lwowska 1, 87-100 Toruń, Poland Theoretical and Applied Climatology (2019) 137:2623–2638 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-018-02763-y