Early instrumental meteorological observations in Switzerland: 1708–1873

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).

Synthetic weather diaries: concept and application to Swiss weather in 1816

“…This analysis accounts for the same errors as in the case of 1816, the only difference being better reconstructions. This estimate is an upper limit of the quality that can possibly be reached 250 years back using additionally digitised data (Brugnara et al, 2020). For the year 1865, the comparison is also shown in Fig.…”

“…The gridded reconstruction is based only on instrumental measurements from three stations. In a recent project we have uncovered (Pfister et al, 2019) and digitised (Brugnara et al, 2020) many more instrumental series for Switzerland back to the early 18th century, such that we now have 10 series for 1816. This effort was part of a global effort to uncover more historical instrumental data (Brönnimann et al, 2019b), a lot of which is currently being digitised.…”

From climate to weather reconstructions

“…The most valuable information for weather reconstructions are instrumental measurements. Long meteorological records that can form the basis for weather reconstructions were compiled within the projects IMPROVE [39], HISTALP [40], and ADVICE [41] for Europe, EMERLAC for Latin America [42] and numerous other projects [43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. Several long time series exist for Europe.…”

Synthetic Weather Diaries: Concept and Application to Swiss Weather in 1816

“…The gridded reconstruction is based only on instrumental measurements from three stations. In a recent project we have uncovered (Pfister et al, 2019) and digitized (Brugnara et al, 2020) many more instrumental series for Switzerland back to the early 18th century, such that we now have ten series for 1816. This effort was part of a global effort to uncover more historical instrumental data (Brönnimann et al, 2019b), a lot of which is currently being digitized.…”