Abstract
Abstract. We describe a dataset of recently digitised meteorological observations from 40 locations in today's Switzerland, covering the 18th and 19th centuries. Three fundamental variables – temperature, pressure, and precipitation – are provided in a standard format after they have been converted into modern units and quality-controlled. The raw data produced by the digitisation, often including additional variables and annotations, are also provided. Digitisation was performed by manually typing the data from photographs of the original sources, which were in most cases handwritten weather diaries. These observations will be important for studying past climate variability in Central Europe and in the Alps, although the general scarcity of metadata (e.g. detailed information on the instruments and their exposure) implies that some caution is required when using them. The data described in this paper can be found at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.909141 (Brugnara, 2020).
Highlights
Past meteorological observations are fundamental to understanding climate variability
We describe a dataset of recently digitised meteorological observations from 40 locations in today’s Switzerland, covering the 18th and 19th centuries
The lack of official standards before the creation of national weather services (NWSs) makes observations difficult to compare with modern records, especially if stations are few and far apart
Summary
Past meteorological observations are fundamental to understanding climate variability. Until at least the 1770s many different temperature scales, often ambiguously defined, were used and spirit of wine was commonly preferred to mercury as a thermometric liquid Another difficulty is that most of the early observations have never been published in extenso and are only available as manuscripts scattered over thousands of archives. Learned societies were founded in the main towns, where their members could present and discuss the latest scientific discoveries Many of these societies had their own meteorological observatory or even set up a regional network of stations (Pfister, 1975; Hupfer, 2015, 2017; Pfister et al, 2019). The project CHIMES (Swiss Early Instrumental Measurements for Studying Decadal Climate Variability) was funded in 2016 by the Swiss National Science Foundation to compile pre-NWS observations in Switzerland and make them available in digital format. 872 883 yes 11 222 no 45 620 yes 31 324 no 752 488 yes 1385 no 2037 yes 28 688 no 62 598 yes 412 660 no
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