Rescuing Pacific Island climate data

NIWA climate scientists are working with Pacific Island National Meteorological Services to ‘rescue’ their climate records. Digitising data held only in paper-based records protects them from degradation. It also makes the data much more readily available for analysis, potentially contributing to a better understanding of long-term climate variation.

Using rescued data to analyse long-term climate trends

Once digitised, the data can be used for long-term historical climate analysis, essential for monitoring climate change. For example, an analysis of Cook Island daily rainfalls showed that the movement of the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ) over the last 60 years has influenced rainfalls to a large degree – but it appears that climate change is also having an impact, as the most extreme (large) rainfall events each year are increasing throughout the Cook Islands, even in locations where total rainfalls are decreasing.

Better analysis of historical data is also likely to improve seasonal climate prediction, which focuses on the effects of El Niño, sea surface temperatures, and other indicators.

Five countries’ data rescued this year

The project, funded for over ten years by SOPAC and others, has enabled data rescue from many regions. This year data from the Cook Islands, Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, and Kiribati are being rescued.

Data include temperature, pressure, wind, cloud, visibility, and rainfall records. Each year, the project digitises and archives 300–400 ‘station years’ of climate data – this equates to many hours of data entry! The data entry is performed by NIWA Auckland staff of Pacific Island heritage, who have been trained in reading weather observations, which are often reported in code.  

Once the data have been ‘rescued’, they are archived into the NIWA National Climate Database, with the aim of each Pacific Island meteorological service easily accessing their own data, online, as required.

Rescuing the paper records

The historical records had mostly been kept in storage facilities in Wellington, New Zealand, from a time when New Zealand retained climate data from nearby Pacific Island nations. Nowadays, many Pacific Island communities handle their own climate data collection and storage. Occasionally, data from other sources is found, such as some early Tongan data recently provided by the UK Meteorological Office.

Some of the longest records recently rescued include Avarua (Rarotonga, Cook Islands), which has daily data from 1906 – present, and the remote Banaba Island, Kiribati (also known as Ocean Island), with intermittent data from 1905.

 

 

Cook Islands climate data record, 1914

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