Speaker
Description
The Congo Basin in Central Africa remains one of the few regions globally where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has not reported observed trends in hot extremes or attributed such changes to anthropogenic influences—primarily due to the scarcity of in situ observational data. Although extensive daily weather records exist, spanning from the 1900s to the early 2000s, and covering numerous stations across the basin, the majority of these remain archived on paper, limiting their accessibility for climate analysis. Here, we present our historical weather data rescue project entailing archived data from 37 weather stations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). We outline the digitization process of these archival records, comprising over 1 million individual observations, and describe the subsequent transcription using MeteoSaver version 1.1. We construct daily time series of daily maximum, average, and minimum temperatures, precipitation, as well as dry bulb and wet bulb temperatures measured at three times per day (06:00, 15:00, and 18:00) across these stations. This newly transcribed dataset provides a critical foundation for undertaking hydroclimatic trend analysis in the Congo Basin—one of the world’s most data-scarce yet climatically significant regions. Using these records, we conduct an analysis of multi-decadal temperature trends across the basin. Our findings reveal a consistent and accelerating warming signal since the 1950s, characterized by a rightward shift in the distribution of daily maximum and minimum temperatures with each successive decade. This highlights the urgent need to close the knowledge gap on climate trends in the Congo Basin.
| If your abstract is not accepted for an oral presentation, would you be interested in presenting it as a poster instead? | Yes |
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| If accepted by the Scientific Board, I agree to have my presentation/poster and abstract published on the Belgian Climate Centre websites and social media. | Yes |
