Long-term instrumental weather records are limited even in data-rich regions like Europe and North America, and much scarcer elsewhere. Understanding climate change requires a truly global picture, built from observations worldwide. While Europe and North America have records from the early 19th century, most other regions lack comparable data until the early–mid 20th century—a gap of about 100 years. This gap limits our ability to study multi-decadal climate change across much of the globe. Closing it requires renewed efforts to rescue historical observations from data-sparse regions. These data are a key starting point to understand the climate of the past, a reference to validate climate models and an input data for reanalyses.
This session invites abstracts on the identification and rescue of historical weather observations from previously unexplored locations and periods. For example, former European territories and administrative regions, and historical weather records from newly independent countries in Asia and Africa. Contributions may focus on new data sources, innovative methods of data extraction, or applications of rescued data. We particularly welcome work using automated AI/ML workflows, citizen science approaches, best practices and studies applying historical data to understand climate extremes, floods, and other risks. This session will further the work on climate adaptation by taking extreme historical climate events into account.
Carla Mateus