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Currently, a long-term dataset of observed hydroclimatic timeseries data, including daily records of precipitation and temperature within the Congo basin, is under development. This entailed two data rescue campaigns within the archives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) at the Yangambi Climate Centre managed by L’Institut National pour l’Etude et la Recherche Agronomiques (INERA) to carry out a data inventory and to scan hard copies of long-term post-1960 hydroclimatic data. We are currently in the process of transcribing these scans of daily precipitation and temperature records from 36 climate stations in the DRC (over 10,000 sheets). Additionally, we are transcribing scans from the Congo Basin Eco-climatological data recovery and valorization project (COBECORE) that contain pre-1960 hydroclimate data available in the State Archives of Belgium.
In this project, members of the department of Water and Climate at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel are collaborating with members of L’Institut National pour l’Etude et la Recherche Agronomiques (INERA) in DRC, COBECORE project at UGent and Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (GhentCDH).
Using the 'Guidelines on Good Practices for Data Rescue by the World Meteorological Organization, our rescue method entails preparing a data inventory, scanning/imaging of the data sheets available within the archives in the DRC and undertaking transcription processes to convert the handwritten records in the images to machine-readable format.