The Importance and Scientific Value of Long Weather and Climate Records; Examples of Historical Marine Data Efforts across the Globe

Abstract

The rescue, digitization, quality control, preservation, and utilization of long and high quality meteorological and climate records, particularly related to historical marine data, are crucial for advancing our understanding of the Earth’s climate system. In combination with land and air measurements, historical marine records serve as foundational pillars in linking present and past weather and climate information, offering essential insights into natural climate variability, extreme events in marine areas, baseline data for assessing current changes, and inputs for enhancing predictive climate models and reanalyses. This paper provides an overview of rescue activities covering marine weather data over the past centuries and presents and highlights several ongoing projects across the world and how the data are used in an integrative and international framework. Current and future continuous efforts in data rescue, digitization, quality control, and the development of temporally high-resolution meteorological and climatological observations from oceans, will greatly help to further complete our understanding and knowledge of the Earth’s climate system, including extremes, as well as improve the quality of reanalysis.