By 1900, a wide range of schemes for mapping climate had emerged in Europe. What most of them had in common was the absence of weather. They represented climate as a static variable, a long-term average, in which phenomena on the time scale of weather—clouds, storms, and gales—were invisible. How could the dynamic nature of climate be made manifest? This presentation will explore the first maps that captured climate dynamics. Produced in Vienna in the 1880s, they were part of a broader burgeoning of thematic cartography in the multinational Habsburg Empire. The revolutions of 1848-9 impressed on Habsburg statesmen the political significance of modern nationalism, and they responded with a new ideology of supranationalism. Geography was one among several disciplines that aimed to survey the vaunted multiplicity of the Habsburg lands and to present its findings to the public, in the form of maps, atlases, panoramas, and museum displays. The simultaneously technical and political challenge of representing the natural and cultural diversity of this territory gave rise to a range of novel techniques, shaping disciplines from ethnography to climatology. Climate maps in the late Habsburg Empire represented climate as a phenomenon of circulation—a motor of unity in diversity—and highlighted its significance for human life.
