Data rescue of national and international meteorological observations at Deutscher Wetterdienst

Historic observational data records are an important contribution for climate reconstructions and analysis of past weather events. Particularly in remote and data sparse regions, such as the open ocean, newly rescued data can significantly improve the knowledge about weather and climatic conditions in earlier decades and centuries.

Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) holds several collections of original historical weather records from land stations and ships. They comprise not only observations from Germany, but also of the global oceans and land stations in many parts of the world.

All German state-owned meteorological observations beginning with the Prussian Meteorological Institute in 1848 are collected in the main archive of DWD in Offenbach.

DWD’s branch office in Hamburg holds the marine archive starting with the collections of the German Naval Observatory, 'Deutsche Seewarte', which existed from 1868 to 1945. It includes marine data records from ships, as well as land stations in many parts of the world (e.g. from former German colonies) and signal stations situated at the coasts of the North and Baltic Sea.

With the further expansion of the IT infrastructure, high temporal resolution data have increasingly become the focus of climate research in recent years. Thus, the processing of such historical data is also increasingly necessary. The digitization of recording strips from pluviographs, for example, is currently one focal point of the data rescue activities at DWD.

The documentation, digitisation and quality check of the enormous quantity of handwritten journals of all four data archives is still ongoing. The digitised data will be freely accessible to all interested scientists and are also continuously submitted to international data archives, such as ICOADS and ISPD. Through these data sets, the data are also an important input for regional and global reanalyses.

The presentation will give an overview of the historical archives of Deutscher Wetterdienst and will show the recent progress of the digitization efforts and ongoing analysis of the data.