Success Stories

ACRE 
The international Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative both undertakes and facilitates the recovery of historical instrumental surface terrestrial and marine global weather observations to underpin 3D weather reconstructions (reanalyses) spanning the last 200-250 years for climate applications and impacts needs worldwide. 
ACRE and ACRE-facilitated 20CR Overview
ACRE structure and map
Allan, R. et al., 2016: Toward integrated historical climate research: the example of Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth, WIREs Clim Change

For the lastest work in ACRE, please read this news item.

HISKLIM
The KNMI-program 'HISKLIM' (HIStorical CLIMate) has the objective to make historical climate data physically accessible for both land and sea, from sources in the Dutch language, with the highest possible temporal resolution and of the best possible quality.

Historical Canadian Climate Data: Volunteer Data Rescue Project
Over the past ten years, with the help of organizations such as the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NICHE), the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), McGill University, and the McCord Museum archives, early weather observations have been copied and digitally imaged. Many of the records are from Eastern Canada, where most of the early settlers lived.

IEDRO
The mission of IEDRO, the International Environmental Data Rescue Organization, is to locate, rescue (image), digitize, archive and share historic weather data across the globe, in areas of need, for the purpose of supporting applications in agriculture, infrastructure planning, disease prevention and climate change.
Current, future, and completed projects

ISTI
The International Surface Temperature Initiative has over the past 5 years worked with numerous international partners to collate existing and rescued holdings into its first databank release which has served to increase the data completeness and station count throughout the long-term record. Although the databank first release consists solely of monthly mean temperatures submission of daily and sub-daily data and non-temperature elements are encouraged. Such data is shared with other relevant holdings such as the International Surface Pressure Databank, Integrated Synoptic Database and Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily. Rescued data under various historical and ongoing DARE projects has been incorporated or is in the process of being incorporated. The Initiative also aims to promote further data rescue of land meteorological data and is willing to partner in such activities or provide letters of support to proposals. It has a particular interest in development and implementation of crowdsourcing approaches to the problem which are likely the most cost effective approach. ISTI can be reached via general.enquiries@surfacetemperatures.org and databank submissions of rescued data can be made by contacting data.submission@surfacetemperatures.org to arrange submission.

JCDP 
The Japan Climate Data Program (JCDP) focuses on data rescue for Southeast and East Asian instrumental meteorological records taken before the funding of official meteorological observations.  After rescuing the data, it is also important to share the data, so JCDP's website is aiming at distributing the data. Besides the instrumental records, datasets of weather descriptions collected from Japanese historical documents are also included and made available to the public in this website.

MEDARE
The MEditerranean climate DAta REscue (MEDARE) is an initiative, born under the auspice of the World Meteorological Organization, with the main objective is being to develop, consolidate and progress climate data and metadata rescue activities across the Greater Mediterranean Region. 

WeatherRescue.org
WeatherRescue.org has used volunteer citizen scientists to rescue >3 million observations taken between 1861-1910. The first set were hourly pressure, temperature, wind, rainfall for the mountain of Ben Nevis and the town of Fort William for 1883-1904. The second set are from the UK Daily Weather Reports, consisting of twice-daily pressure, temperature and daily rainfall observations, for the period 1900-1910. Locations all over Europe are included. The third set is for 1861-1875 from the UK Daily Weather Reports. Weather reconstructions are visualized on the website of brohan.org. For example the Uysses storm of February 1903 has been reconstructed with higher details after the inclusion of the new observations.

Rescued precipitation data in Germany
The left graph shows the monthly maximum of daily precipitation for June 1893-2002 at station Hilden in Germany. The blue curve shows the already available data since 1931 while the orange curve represents the newly digitized part (1893-1930). The background shows the original paper document with the maximum on 66.5 mm at the 8th of June 1905.  The right graph shows the yearly maximum of daily precipitation from 1897-2008 for station Stralsund with newly digitized data for the period 1897-1950.  The graphs were kindly provided by Mr. Hermann Mächel of Deutscher Wetterdienst, Germany.