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 (which ran from 2013-2017)".

TEMPEST was designed as a freely accessible and user-friendly database resource on the UK’s weather and climate history. TEMPEST is 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 (consequentially, please see the quality statement note below concerning data issues). 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 - some as early as 1346 - of weather history and relate to places across the UK, though the 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.

Users are advised to read the quality statement carefully with regards to possible issues in date and location accuracy and the way "extreme" events were documented. Additionally, users should be aware that the period covered by the dataset includes the change from the Julian to Gregorian calendar. In order to manage that change 11 days were omitted from the year 1752, i.e. the day after the 2 September 1752 was 14 September, in accordance with the Calendar Act of 1751. Until September 1752 the New Year began on 25 March (Lady Day) but dual dating was commonplace for many years before, adding a further layer of complication to events that took place from 1 January to 24 March, and making 1751 a short year running from 25 March to 31 December! Scotland had changed the start of the year to 1 January in 1600. Where clear, the Gregorian calendar date has been used, providing further details in the notes section.