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Millions of sub‐daily sea‐level pressure observations taken between 1919 and 1960 over the British and Irish Isles were transcribed from paper records in the early 2000s but were not published and subsequently forgotten. A chance discussion led to the rediscovery of the transcribed data and 5.47 million observations from 160 locations are now made available, although the data have not been fully quality‐controlled. Much of the data are 3‐hourly, allowing for detailed examinations of synoptic weather variations for this region and time period, and will be invaluable for constraining future reanalyses. We illustrate the value of the data using a stormy period during October and November 1928 and discuss the remaining quality‐control issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe the results of a climate data rescue (DARE) activity conducted at the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute (Kyiv, Ukraine) in cooperation with the Justus Liebig University Giessen (Giessen, Germany), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Met Office Hadley Centre (Exeter, United Kingdom). The focus of our work is on pre‐1850 sub‐daily meteorological observations conducted on the territory of modern Ukraine. Data from eight stations (stored in special hard copy tables/books, with handwritten records) have been digitized during the DARE process, resulting in 291,103 rescued values in total. More than half of this number (165,980, ~57%) are related to air temperature data, 124,376 data values (~42.7%) concern atmospheric pressure records and 747 values (~0.3%) are precipitation data. Simple quality control of the digitized data has been conducted, including an intercomparison between stations as well as comparison with monthly temperature data previously digitized from other paper sources. The quality control procedures revealed fairly good agreement between rescued time series on the monthly time scale as well as with the monthly data from independent sources. However, several periods for a few stations should be used with caution due to relatively large discrepancies that were found. The rescued digital database can be used for extreme value analysis for the pre‐1850 period in comparison with today's climate, regional climatological studies and will be used for future Reanalysis. In addition, for the first time, we show that subdaily temperature from Kyiv during 'the year without summer' 1816 in Western and Central Europe were not anomalous in this part of Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative approaches to climate risk management such as mapping or impact modelling rely on past meteorological data with daily or sub‐daily resolution, a large fraction of which have not yet been digitized. Over the last decade or so, a number of projects have contributed to the rescue of some of these data. Here we provide a summary of a survey we have undertaken of several meteorological and climate data rescue projects, in order to identify the needs of climate data rescue services. To make these efforts more sustainable, additional integrated activities are needed. We argue that meteorological and climate data rescue must be seen as a continuous, coordinated long‐term effort. Technical developments (e.g. data assimilation), new scientific questions (e.g. process understanding of extreme events) and new social (e.g. risk assessment, health) or economic (e.g. new renewable energy sources, agriculture and forestry, tourism, infrastructure, etc.) services are highlighting the immense value of data previously neglected or never considered. This continuous effort is currently undertaken by projects of various sizes, structure, funding and staffing, as well as by dedicated programmes, ranging from those within many national weather services down to "grassroots" initiatives. These activities are often not sufficiently coordinated, staffed, or funded at an international level and will benefit considerably from climate data rescue services being established within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) (https://climate.copernicus.eu/). Open Practices: This article has earned an Open Data badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]