Early instrumental meteorological observations in Switzerland: 1708–1873.

We describe a dataset of recently digitised meteorological observations from 40 locations in today's Switzerland, covering the 18th and 19th century. Three fundamental variables – temperature, pressure, and precipitation – are provided in a standard format, after they have been converted into modern units and quality controlled. The raw data produced by the digitisation, often including additional variables and annotations, are also provided. Digitisation was performed by manually typing the data from photographs of the original sources, which were in most cases handwritten weather diaries. These observations will be important for studying past climate variability in Central Europe and in the Alps, although the general scarcity of metadata (e.g., detailed information on the instruments and their exposure) implies that some caution is required when using the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]