The aims of the "Spaces of Experience and Horizons of Expectation: Extreme weather in the UK, past, present and future" project were to use documentary archives to develop local and regional climate histories in order to:

- identify periods of unusual weather and extreme events;
- investigate the scale of impact and the nature of human responses;
- explore the nature of the recording and recollection or memory of events.

All of these elements are believed crucial for understanding the nature of the events that might take place in the future.

TEMPEST (Tracking Extremes of Meteorological Phenomena Experienced in Space and Time) is the major output of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project “Spaces of Experience and Horizons of Expectation: Extreme Weather in the UK, Past, Present and Future (2013-2017)" (AHRC grant award: AH/K005782/1). TEMPEST was designed as a freely accessible and user-friendly database resource on the UK’s weather and climate history. TEMPEST was comprised of narrative accounts of extreme weather events of all types, extracted from documentary materials located in a range of archival repositories in the UK. The information has been extracted from a wide range of documents, including letters, diaries, church records, school log-books and many others. The entries span more than 400 years of weather history and relate to places across the UK, though our data search was focused in five case-study regions: Central England, Southwest England, East Anglia, Wales, and Northwest Scotland. Each event entry or narrative has been assigned to at least one weather type, is dated (at least to a year), and is geographically referenced (using digital coordinates). Many also contain material relating to the impacts of the weather event and responses to it. In addition to information on extreme weather events, TEMPEST contains details of the original documents, their authors, and the collections and repositories in which they are held. TEMPEST is searchable by all of these fields.