RescueKLIMA (2026-2028)

Greece has a rich archival heritage of weather observations dating back to the late 19th century, yet only a small part has so far been rescued and used by policy makers to address critical societal challenges of climate change. This absence of quality-verified (sub)daily weather observations, particularly precipitation, undermines the accuracy of reanalyses and amplifies uncertainty in assessing climate trends across eastern Mediterranean. RescueΚλίμα is responding to the national request for actionable climate information by digitizing late- 19th and early-20th century weather observations thus significantly enhancing the number, quality, availability and access of national historical climate data. RescueΚλίμα will design and implement data rescue (DARE), adhering to C3S-DRS protocols, to digitize 115000 (sub)daily weather paper reports from historical stations of the Hellenic National Meteorological Service (1932-1954), the National Observatory of Athens (1893-1931) and the Ministry of Rural Development and Food, commenced in the 1930’s. This new service enriches the collection of climate services already provided by the C3S-NCP ClimateHub.gr and opens to the public an extensive repository of images, quality data and new knowledge about the 20th century history of climate extremes in Greece. An impactful communication and user engagement plan will strengthen the uptake of new data and services to national authorities and end users and to promote the importance of DARE to data holders, thus securing the sustainability of the service. To achieve these objectives RescueΚλίμα teams up a multi-disciplinary consortium of 3 Greek institutions: the Academy of Athens, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the National Observatory of Athens. RescueΚλίμα is actively supported by the Hellenic Meteorological Society and the Greek Ministry of the Environment and Energy, the legislative national authority for climate change adaptation.