Particularly for records prior to the mid-twentieth Century there likely exists as much data in non-digital form as exists in the current digital archives. These data have enormous potential to improve our understanding of historical climate variability and change. The data rescue activities under the International Surface Temperatures Initiative revolve largely around pulling through existing digitization efforts to the databank and attempting to ensure against redundancy of effort. The vast majority of the work is done by pre-existing programs where the credit for much of the data rescue clearly lies.

There is a poster describing the work of this task team, first presented at the World Climate Research Program's Open Science Conference. This will be updated as and when significant developments occur. Task team members are encouraged to present this poster at relevant meetings.

Data rescue activities
Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE)
International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO)
NOAA's Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP)
WMO sponsored MEditeranean climate DAta REscue initiative (MEDARE)


This video was prepared by IEDRO and ACRE for distribution to delegations of National Meteorological Services at the World Meteorological Organization's 16th congress in May 2011.

Data rescue effort coordination
A master listing excel file of known efforts is maintaned by the British Atmospheric Data Centre on behalf of ACRE, available here. Please let us know of any omissions.

Crowdsourcing digitization
http://www.data-rescue-at-home.org/ - land and upper air data (6/14 now working again)
https://sites.google.com/site/historicalclimatedata/canadian-historical-data-typing-project - Canadian data
Report on visit to NOAA NCDC by zooniverse, hosts of the hugely successful marine crowdsourcing oldweather.org

Known repositories of imaged data
NOAA Foreign Data Library
British Atmospheric Data Centre

Data Rescue Task Team Membership current 10/22/13

Peter Thorne (NERSC, Norway) (Chair)
Rob Allan (Met Office Hadley Centre, UK) (ACRE project lead)
Richard Crouthamel (International Environmental Data Rescue Organization, IEDRO, USA)
William Angel (NOAA NCDC CDMP)
Manola Brunet (University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain) (WMO/MEDARE Initiative lead)
Stefan Bronnimann (University of Bern, Switzerland) (http://www.data-rescue-at-home.org/)
Jay Lawrimore (NOAA NCDC) (Chair, Databank Working Group)
Hermann Machel (DWD, Germany)
Juerg Luterbacher (Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, Germany)
Masumi Zaiki (Seikei University, Tokyo, Japan)
Arfon Smith (Zooniverse, Oxford University, UK)
Stuart Lynn (Zooniverse, Oxford University, UK)

This task team exists to facilitate data rescue and digitization and ensure that as much of the data that is digitized as possible is ingested into the databank.