Dieci e Lode: Climate data of Former Italian Colonies and their Digitalization

Italy has played a significant role in the birth and development of modern meteorology, and it owns a heritage of ancient meteorological data of exceptional value; however, despite many developed activities, a substantial number of data remains available only on paper, which unfortunately is deteriorating over time, risking the loss of data and information of inestimable worth for scientific research in the field of meteorology and climate change. Among the many data still to be recovered, there is a very significant fraction of those collected in territories belonging to Italy (Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Libya, Dodecanese, Albania, Dalmatia, Istria) between the late 19th century and the early 20th century. In this context, the present project aims to conduct a detailed reconnaissance of meteorological information available for these areas during the period of the Italian control.

Regarding data and volumes, the main source will be the National Meteorological Archive of the CREA (Council for Research in Agricultural and the analysis of Agricultural Economy) in Rome, specifically the Historical Central Library of Italian Meteorology. Once the most relevant data and other information have been identified, activities will proceed with 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 of digitizing climatological data from former Italian colonies represents a significant step towards understanding climate of the past in areas that still lack a dense monitoring network for detecting meteorological phenomena. The availability and accessibility of data in international databases will allow for a full utilization of these recovered values, which will be relevant for a better understanding of climate change in the territories covered by the project.

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 Sciences 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.