Archives and Climate Science: Transforming Paper Documents into Global Climate Datasets

Climate science depends on reliable historical weather data. Much of this data can be found in paper documents spanning decades or centuries and is held in archives around the world. Norway has a rich archival heritage, of which only a small part has so far been used by climate scientists. The data is needed to establish long-term climate trends, for the reconstruction of past weather events, to better understand the best sites to establish wind and solar farms and to improve weather forecasting models as well as many other applications. Documents from the archives are scanned and transcribed by various methods with the data then subjected to rigorous quality control, before being used for global climate datasets and weather reconstructions. Finding and assessing suitable material, then imaging and transcribing the documents, is labour-intensive work, and the scale of the task is daunting if the scientific community is to fully realise the potential of archives in Norway and elsewhere in the world. This provides a unique opportunity for archives and archivists to work with scientists from around the world to improve our understanding of the earth’s climate and thereby mitigate some of the effects of climate change and improve weather forecasting.