The public memory of the weather

What was the weather like, in the UK, on the 13th February 1947?, or indeed, 1847?

As well as the resources of the National Meteorological Library and Archive (NMLA). The Met Office provides some gridded datasets (HadUK-Grid), some readily accessible station data, and (with some restrictions) the MIDAS database.

Some UK station data are available directly from the Met Office (Source).

The range of the digitised datasets, and the data in MIDAS, is directly limited by the amount of data that has been digitised. It is notable that the UK datasets often have a start-date that is later than their global equivalents - there are important differences in their construction, but we should be able to make climate reconstructions for the UK that go further back than reconstructions for the whole world.

The UK datasets also demonstrate that there are customers for many different vaiables (Tmax, Tmin, precipitation, sunshine, …) and for both daily and monthly gridded reconstructions (as well as station data). This suggests that cherry-picking variables and time-scales is not worth it, and argues for a comprehensive approach to digitisation.

Digitised UK data needs to go to MIDAS for use in the UK datasets, but also to the global databases, for global and international use. We need to coordinate this.