Abstract: This paper presents results of comparing the ERA-20C and NOAA-CIRES-DOE 20th Century Reanalysis Version 3 atmospheric reanalyses of the 20th century with data of meteorological observations made during the forced drift of the St. Anna schooner in 1912–1914 in Arctic. Synchronous time series of atmospheric pressure, air temperature, wind speed and direction were compared using correlation analysis and estimates of the mean error (bias) and root-mean-square error (RMSE). To compare wind data, specialized techniques for analyzing vector series were used. For all meteorological characteristics, the NOAA-CIRES-DOE 20th Century Version 3 reanalysis shows higher values of correlation and the lowest RMSE values. The minimum mean error values for atmospheric pressure and air temperature data are shown by the ERA-20C reanalysis. It has been established that there is a systematic deviation of approximately 12°–15° between the wind measurement data and the reanalysis wind.