Dieci e Lode: Climate Data from Former Italian Colonies and their Digitalization

Dieci e Lode is a cooperative project involving researchers from various affiliations under the umbrella of the Italian Association of Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology (AISAM). The project aims to rescue and digitize data from meteorological observations made in former Italian colonies and territories. 

Indeed, in the history of meteorology, Italy had a pivotal role in the development of observations, from the invention of some of the most important instruments to the establishment of the first international network of observations. Therefore, a huge heritage of enormously valuable data has been accumulated in many Italian archives over the past three centuries; however, despite many projects that have contributed to rescuing a significant part of this heritage, a substantial number of data archives remains available only on paper, which unfortunately is exposed to deteriorating over time, risking the loss of data and information of inestimable value for scientific research as well as for a variety of applications in the field of meteorology and climate, including the assessment of climate change.

Among those still to be recovered, a very significant fraction is represented by data from former Italian colonies or territories ruled by Italy, in different periods, between the late 19^th century and the early 20^th century (such as Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Libya, Dodecanese, Albania, Dalmatia, and Istria).

Hence, the present project aims to conduct a detailed search of meteorological information available for these regions during the periods mentioned above.

The main source will be the National Meteorological Archive of the Council for Research in Agricultural Economy (CREA) in Rome, specifically the Historical Central Library of Italian Meteorology.

The project will also pursue an extensive photographic scanning aimed at publishing online images of the data sheets and volumes; the overall number of pages expected to be scanned is approximately 40,000.

The project represents a significant step towards understanding the climate of the past in those Regions that still lack a large archive of past meteorological data. In particular, these data are of great importance for meteorological offices currently monitoring these territories to place meteorological observations in a longer-term context and, therefore, of greater significance in the study of ongoing climate change.

The investigation will be complemented by case studies aimed at evaluating possible implementations of citizen science activities aimed at extracting numerical series from digitized data sheets available for climatological research, in line with other works led by AISAM (Italian Association of Atmospheric Science and Meteorology), such as the Cli-DaRe@School project, which involves the participation of many Italian schools and hundreds of students. A feasibility study will also be conducted to assess how these activities can be supported by the latest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.