Data rescue of daily climate station-based observations across Europe

Abstract. In the framework of the project Integrated approach for the development across Europe of user oriented climate indicators for GFCS high-priority sectors: agriculture, disaster risk reduction, energy, health, water and tourism (INDECIS 2017–2020), around 610K climate station-based observations were rescued over European regions for the main climate variables (maximum and minimum temperature, rainfall, sunshine duration and snow depth) along the 20th century at daily scale. Rescued data will constitute, together with other gathered regional datasets, the INDECIS-Raw-Dataset, which will expand current European data coverage contained in the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D). An extensive examination of the ECA&D dataset was conducted to find spatial-temporal data gaps or stations with low percentage of daily data as prior candidates for data recovery in European regions. This exercise led us to focus our efforts on the Central European region and the Balkans. Digitizing was carried out by using a rigorous key as you see method, meaning that the digitizers type the values provided by data images, rather than using any coding system. Digitizers carefully cross-checked the typed values against original sources for the 10th, 20th and 30th day of each month to make sure that no days were skipped or repeated during the digitizing process. Monthly totals and statistical summaries were computed from transcribed data and were compared with monthly totals and summaries provided by data sources to check accuracy as preliminary quality control. The digitizing method and the quality control of the digitizing process applied in this study ensured an accurate data transcription according to the obtained statistics.

The daily dataset rescued in this study across Europe is available at: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.896957