Global Instrumental Meteorological Database Before 1890 – a useful overview

This work describes the compilation of global instrumental climate data with a focus on the 18th and early 19th centuries. This database provides early instrumental data recovered for thousands of locations around the world. Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated “early instrumental data”. Much of the data is taken from repositories we know (GHCN, ISTI, CRUTEM, Berkeley Earth, HISTALP). In addition, many of these stations have not been digitized before. Therefore,  we provide a new global collection of monthly averages of multivariable meteorological parameters before 1890 based on land-based meteorological station data. The product will be form as the most comprehensive global monthly climate data set, encompassing temperature, pressure, and precipitation as ever done. These data will be quality controlled and analyzed with respect to climate variability and they be assimilated into global climate model simulations to provide monthly global reconstructions. The collection has resulted in a completely new database that is uniform, where no interpolations are included. Therefore, we are left with climate reconstruction that becomes very authentic. This compilation will describe the procedure and various challenges we have encountered by creating a unified database that can later be used for e.g. models. It will also describe the strategy for quality control that has been adopted is a sequence of tests.