Global Historical Climate Database - HCLIM

There is a growing need for past weather and climate data to support science and decision-making. This presentation describes the compilation and the construction of global monthly instrumental climate data with a focus on the 18th and early 19th centuries. This database provides early instrumental data, and it is multivariable (air temperature, pressure, precipitation sum, number of precipitation days) are recovered for thousands of locations around the world for that encompasses a substantial body of the known early instrumental time series. 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. It ends up in one database with the same format, so it is easy to use the data with a good overview of metadata. The dataset contains series compiled from existing databases that start before 1890 (though continuing to the present) as well as a large amount of newly rescued data. The first record is from 1586. All series underwent a quality control procedure and subdaily series were processed to monthly mean values. An inventory was compiled, and the collection was deduplicated based on coordinates and mutual correlations. The data are provided in a common format accompanied by the inventory. The collection totals 12452 meteorological records in 118 countries. The data can be used for climate reconstructions and analyses. It is the most comprehensive global monthly climate data set for the preindustrial period.