About the project
The project began in 2009, when a retired lighthouse keeper's family offered us eleven cardboard boxes of observation journals from a decommissioned station on the Helgeland coast. The journals covered 1911 to 1968 with only two missing years. Rather than let them go to a local museum basement, we scanned them page by page and began transcribing the daily readings into spreadsheets. Word spread among station observers and local history societies, and more material arrived: agricultural school registers, harbour logs, and the private weather diaries that many Scandinavian households once kept as a matter of routine.
Today the archive is maintained by about thirty volunteers — retired meteorologists, students, local historians and programmers — coordinated loosely from Bergen, Uppsala and Turku. We are not an institute and we sell nothing. Server costs are covered by small donations and by a modest grant from a Nordic cultural heritage fund, first awarded in 2016 and renewed twice since.
Sources and quality
Most series are transcribed from primary sources: the original station journals. Where a national meteorological institute (MET Norway, SMHI, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, DMI) already holds a digital version of a series, we link to theirs instead of duplicating effort, and we concentrate on the gaps — stations, decades or variables the official digitisation programmes have not reached. Every transcribed value passes an automated range check against climatological extremes for the station, and a sample of one page in twenty is re-keyed by a second volunteer to estimate the error rate, which currently stands at 0.4 per thousand values.
Licence and citation
All datasets are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may copy, redistribute and build upon the data for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you credit the archive and the dataset identifier. The underlying journal scans remain the property of the lending families and institutions and are not covered by this licence.