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Daily weather observations measured by students and staff at Halkali Agricultural School (a school opened in 1892 on agriculture and animal husbandry during the Ottoman period) from 1896 to 1917 in Istanbul, Turkiye have been transcribed from the original publications into digital form and translated from Ottoman Turkish (the Perso‐Arabic script) to English (Latin alphabet). Over 55,000 observations of daily maximum, minimum and average temperature; rainfall, soil and under soil (0.25 m) temperature; humidity, pressure and wind speed were recovered. In addition, weather observations taken in Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute from 1911 to 1936 and taken in Florya Meteorological Station from 1937 to 2022 could inform long‐term temperature changes in Istanbul. The publication of a new historical data set that includes, for the first time, digitized and quality‐controlled daily meteorological observations in Istanbul will enhance the understanding of weather changes in Turkiye back to the late 19th century. These observations will be used to fill gaps in existing temperature and pressure records and to the improvement of the accuracy of reanalysis products prior to the 1950s. It will be the first data set publication of other parameters such as soil temperature, wind speed and humidity for that period in that region. Data are available on the CEDA Archive in csv file format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has affected not only populations around the world but also the environment and natural resources. Lockdowns and restricted lifestyles have had wide-ranging impacts on the environment (e.g., air quality in cities). Although hygiene and disinfection procedures and precautions are effective ways to protect people from Covid-19, they have significant consequences for water usage and resources especially given the increasing impacts of climate change on rainfall patterns, water use and resources. Climate change and public health issues may compound one another, and so we used a drivers, pressures, state, impact, response framework (not previously used to examine the actual and potential impacts of Covid-19 and climate change on water consumption and resources) to scope the main factors that may interact to affect water use and resources (in the form of reservoirs) using evidence from Istanbul, Türkiye, with some discussion of the comparative situation elsewhere. We modified initial views on the framework to account for the regional, city and community level experiences. We note that water consumption in Istanbul has been increasing over the last two decades (except in times of very low rainfall/drought); that there were increases in water consumption in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic; and, despite some increase in rainfall, water levels in reservoirs appeared to decrease during lockdowns (for a range of reasons). Through a new simple way of visualising the data, we also noted that a low resource capacity might be recurring every 6 or 7 years in Istanbul (a similar finding to Thames Reservoir in London). We made no attempt in this paper to quantify the relative contribution that climate change, population growth, etc., are making to water consumption and reservoir levels as we focused on looking at those social, environmental and economic factors that appear to play a role in potential water stress and on developing a drivers, pressures, state, impact, response framework for policy and adaptive management options for Istanbul and other large complex conurbations. If there are periodic water resource issues and temperatures rise as expected in climate projections with an accompanying increase in the duration of hot spells, the subsequent additional stress on water systems might make managing future public health emergencies, such as a pandemic, even more difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]