Data rescue of early historical meteorological observations from Ireland

Historical meteorological observations are crucial for better assessing past climate variability and trends in the frequency, intensity, duration, and distribution of extreme weather events, and for placing the current climate change into historical context. Specifically, long-term high-resolution data at daily and hourly scales are essential for a more accurate assessment of past and rare extreme weather events. Historical meteorological observations are crucial for generating climate products, such as reanalysis and gridded datasets.

Ireland has a great heritage of historical instrumental meteorological observations. This presentation will primarily focus on four meteorological collections, which have been rescued from the original paper sources and digitally preserved, including methodologies and examples of data application for climate research:

1) Meteorological observations from over 40 locations in Ireland registered from 1783 to 1854 and preserved in the archives of the Royal Irish Academy.

2) Meteorological observations from over 70 locations in Ireland registered from 1808 to 1939 and rescued from newspapers.

3) Meteorological observations from Dunsink Observatory from 1818 to 1850.

4) Meteorological observations from Ulster, including the long-term series registered at the Linen Hall (1796 to 1895) and Queen’s College Belfast (1850-1919).

Observed variables include air temperature, maximum and minimum air temperatures, dry and wet bulb temperatures, sea temperature, rainfall, pressure, wind direction and force, maximum air temperature in the sun, humidity, cloud cover, cloud form, tension of vapour, and state of the weather as qualitative remarks. It is very important to make these observations published in newspapers available since the majority of the original manuscripts are not traceable.

Many well-known historical extreme weather events in Ireland, such as extreme air temperatures and storms, are documented in historical meteorological records.

The metadata and data from these meteorological collections have been rescued and will be made available as open access in forthcoming peer-reviewed publications and digital datasets.