Welcome
The Nordpolar Weather Archive is a volunteer-run project that collects, digitises and preserves historical meteorological observations from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Much of the material originates from handwritten observation journals kept at lighthouses, coastal stations, mountain lodges and agricultural schools between the late nineteenth century and the introduction of automatic weather stations. Paper journals deteriorate, ink fades, and station archives are periodically discarded; our aim is to scan, transcribe and quality-check these records before they are lost, and to publish them in open, machine-readable formats for researchers, teachers and anyone curious about the climate history of the Nordic region.
At present the archive holds daily observations from 214 stations, comprising roughly 9.6 million individual measurements of temperature, precipitation, air pressure, wind, snow depth and cloud cover. The longest continuous series, from Bergen, begins in 1862. All data are released under the CC BY 4.0 licence with no registration required.
Latest additions
- October 2026 — Tromsø lighthouse journals 1911–1938 transcribed and published (dataset NP-0417). Includes twice-daily pressure readings previously missing from the national series.
- September 2026 — Snow depth records from 34 Swedish mountain stations, 1961–1990, converted from the original SMHI yearbooks.
- August 2026 — A correction pass over the Finnish lake-district stations fixed 1,204 transcription errors found by our range-checking volunteers.
- June 2026 — Danish island stations: Bornholm and Ærø daily series 1901–1975 now available in NetCDF as well as CSV.
How the data are organised
Each station forms one dataset containing a metadata record (location, elevation, instrument history, observer notes) and a table of daily values in UTC. Quality flags follow the convention of the source institutes: 0 for unchecked, 1 for range-checked, 2 for neighbour-compared and 3 for manually verified against the original journal scan. Scans of the source journals are stored with our partner university library and can be requested through the datasets page.
If you use the archive in published work, we ask only that you cite the dataset identifier and the archive itself. A suggested citation is given on every dataset page.