Summary

The CS08 project focuses on the digitization of data sources of long time series of meteorological variables. The resulting datasets play an important role in the infrastructural planning of the Netherlands and form the basis for studies into climate change and its consequences. For instance, the design standards of river dikes, drainage and sewerage systems are to a large extent determinded by the occurrence of extreme meteorological events in the past. Furthermore, the availability of digital meteorological data sets is essential for detecting and understanding climate change and its consequences, including the calibration, verification and tuning of (impact) models. The Netherlands is one of the few countries where meteorological data with sufficient length and resolution, in space and time, are available. However, much of this data is only available on paper. The CS08 digitized a large amount of this data and entered it into digital data sets. It concerns the following four data sources: (1) all time series with daily precipitation for the period 1850-1950, (2) high-resolution (5-minute) precipitation totals from pluviographs of the stations De Bilt (1897- 1993), Eelde (1954-1993), Den Helder/De Kooy (1954-1993), Vlissingen (1954-1993), Beek (1954-1993) and Amsterdam (1920-1983), (3) multi-day weather forecasts for several locations in the 18th and 19th century, and (4) hourly temperatures of Batavia / Jakarta in the period 1866-1980. The data sources are checked for quality and are freely available via the Internet. Several examples of applications are presented.

Read more: synthesis report
Contact: project CS08