Investigating the potential for students to contribute to climate data rescue: Introducing the Climate Data Rescue Africa project (CliDaR-Africa)

Abstract

The majority of available climate data in global digital archives consist of data only from the 1940s or 1950s onwards, and many of these series have gaps and/or are available for only a subset of the variables which were actually observed. However, there exist billions of historical weather observations from the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s that are still in hard-copy form and are at risk of being lost forever due to deterioration. An assessment of changes in climate extremes in several IPCC regions was not possible in IPCC AR6 WGI owing, in many cases, to the lack of available data. One such region is Africa, where the climate impact research and the ability to predict climate change impacts are hindered by the paucity of access to consistent good-quality historical observational data. The aim of this innovative project was to use classroom-based participatory learning to help transcribe some of the many meteorological observations from Africa that are thus far unavailable to researchers. This project transcribed quickly and effectively station series by enrolling the help of second-year undergraduate students at Maynooth University in Ireland. The newly digitized African data will increase the temporal and spatial coverage of data in this important data-sparse region. Students gained new skills while helping the global scientific community unearth new insight into past African climate. The project managed to transcribe 79 months of data at Andapa in Madagascar and 56 months of data for Macenta in Guinea. The digitized data will be openly and freely shared with the scientific and wider community via the Pangaea data repository, the C3S Climate Data Store, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) data centre in the US. The project model has the potential for a broader roll-out to other educational contexts and there is no shortage of data to be rescued. This paper provides details of the project, and all supporting information such as project guidelines and templates to enable other organizations to instigate similar programs.