Priorities for UK weather data rescue

Our understanding of weather and climate depends fundamentally on observations, and access to weather observations covering a long period is a key requirement for research on climate variability and change. The UK archives preserve a wealth of weather observations, going back hundreds of years, but many are undigitised, and so unavailable for most use. We would like to digitise all the archived observations, but that is a lot of work, and will take a long time. So we need to prioritise.

This document describes the main groups of archive records we should consider for digitisation, the customers for the data when digitised, and the practicalities of the process. It makes recommendations for digitisation work in the near future.

• What's available?
  • UK Station data sources
  • Ships’ logs
  • Foreign data in UK Archives
  • Early and Irregular data
• Who wants it?
  • Met Office digital archives
  • Met Office Global Datasets
  • Reanalyses
  • International digital archives
• Who else is interested?
• What would it take?
• What should we do?
  • General principles
  • Short-term specific priorities

• Small Print

This document is crown copyright (2019). It is published under the terms of the Open Government Licence.