The citizen-science project Cli-DaRe@School: engaging high school students in digitizing data from historical meteorological observations in Italy

Cli-DaRe@School is a citizen science project with the main goal of digitizing ancient and unexploited Italian meteorological observations still available only on paper or as scanned images of original records or published yearbooks. Launched in spring 2022 as a long-term coordinated initiative of the Italian Association of Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology (AISAM) engaging a variety of researchers, as well as their affiliation Institutions, and high-school students and teachers.

During the first year the project focused on the target of four comprehensive monographs published by the Italian Hydrographic Service including about 6000 records of monthly temperature and precipitation data for the Italian territory. The temperature data cover the timespan 1926-1955 while the precipitation data refer to the years before 1950. A team of 334 students from 10 high schools in Italy was engaged. Each school was assigned pdf files containing the scanned pages to digitize, along with spreadsheet templates for data entry, and related tutorials. The person-hours dedicated to data digitization were about 4000, making about 4000 scanned pages digitized. Students had also the opportunity to join a training program offered by the project consisting of seminars explicitly meant for them. The goal of the seminar was to allow students to delve into various aspects of climate change and meteorology, and specific activities aimed to make them aware of the potentialities of the recovered data. Cli-DaRe@School is a remarkable citizen-science initiative for two main reasons: on one side it demonstrates the potentialities of high school students in providing an enormous contribution to rescue past meteorological data and making the freely available on open-access repositories, and on the other side bears a great educational added value, offering young students an easy hands-on experience with climate data and making them more aware of how science investigates past climatic trends.

At the end of the first year, we submitted a questionnaire to both students and teachers to probe their satisfaction with the project activities and gather suggestions for the following years. The questionnaire highlighted a good level of satisfaction for the teachers and a higher satisfaction for the students who explicitly chose to participate in the project with respect to those who participated as a class group and the most critical point resulted the number of hours dedicated to the digitization.

The quality check of the digitized data is performed partially automatically by means of an R code and partially manually and it is almost finished for the period 1921-1950, whereas it is still in progress for the previous years. Station metadata turned out to be a frequent source of errors, while the digitized precipitation and temperature data exhibited a very low fraction of errors. Currently, the activities to include the newly rescued records by populating already existing databases of long-term Italian precipitation and temperature series are in progress, and we aim to release the digitized data as open source in the next months.