Rescuing historical data from the ACMAD collection- The importance for climate research in Africa.

Although much work has been conducted worldwide to discover, rescue and digitise historical weather observations, there remains a lack of access to weather observations from many regions of the world. One such region is Africa which has a scarcity of historical observations available from the pre satellite era which is preventing important research taking place on past extreme weather events and the climate of the continent. The need for this data becomes more urgent when we consider that the workforce in African countries is disproportionately employed in climate-exposed sectors with over 60% employed in the agricultural sector where crops are completely dependent on rainfall. The ACMAD (African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development) collection offers an opportunity to improve the temporal and spatial data available across the continent of Africa with data available in some countries as far back as the late nineteenth century.          

An inventory has been created of the collection and shows that within it a large amount of unique data exists that has not been previously inventoried by other sources. This includes numerous weather stations that have never been inventoried before. With an estimated four million images within the collection, numerous methods are required to digitise the unique data. The team in ICARUS (Irish Climate Analysis Research UnitS), Maynooth University, launched a project called CliDAR-Africa, where we assisted second year undergraduate geography students to digitise unique data from stations in Madagascar and Guinea. Discussion on the use of AI as a tool to transcribe data have also taken place. Quality issues with the images within the collection also exist and the team have been developing a citizen science project where inferior quality images can be identified. Once identified it is hoped that the quality of these images can be improved at a later date.

In my presentation I will discuss the various issues with the ACMAD collection the ICARUS team are attempting to solve, the results following the inventorying of the collection, efforts to digitise data from Madagascar, proposed projects involving Citizen Science and AI, and finally the important need to rescue African meteorological data in order to improve our knowledge of climate change and extreme weather events in Africa.