The Royal Society: Historic Weather Data Made Available to Scientists and Public, Spanning Antarctica to Greenland

From The Royal Society:

An archive of over 1,600 sets of meteorological, magnetic and tidal observations taken from 1706-1915 from across the globe has been digitised for the first time. The treasure trove of historic weather data and imagery is now available for scientists across the globe to study on the Royal Society’s Science in the Making portal.

Tens of thousands of individual observations show raw scientific data and weather readings from across all six continents and all oceans, from the Northern shores of Greenland to the Southern ice of Antarctica; tidal observations at London Docks to temperatures in London, Ontario; rainfall in Colombia to wind direction in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Highlights include a two-meter-long graph showing hourly magnetic observations in Singapore from 1844-45, a watercolour graph of weather readings from a regiment hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, 1858, and a dodecagon graph showing daily weather readings at Port Arthur, Australia, in 1840.

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The Royal Society’s Meteorological Archive was created in 1839, 15 years before the formation of the MET office, when Sir John Herschel set up a dedicated ‘department’ for the society’s collection of meteorological manuscripts. This was accompanied by active record-hunting across the Society’s global scientific networks.

Royal Society historian Louisiane Ferlier said, “This vast collection of data represents the birth of meteorology as a rigorous science, where the process of weather recording became standardised to enable weather comparisons on a global scale. It was Herschel’s ambition to make this data open for anyone ‘of every age and nation’ to use. Now we are finally opening up this treasure trove of data and history to the global public and researchers alike, to help fill gaps in our understanding of global climate history.

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The meteorological data will be registered as part of the Data Rescue Service supported by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Data Rescue Service, under the leadership of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI).

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

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