Important data from the African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD) collection have been recently rescued from unstable fiche media and scanned to digital images by the EU funded Copernicus Climate Change Service and the Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) of Belgium. The team at the C3S2-311 Lot 1 Collection and Processing of In Situ Observations service led by the Irish Climate Analysis and Research UnitS (ICARUS) at Maynooth University, Ireland. The Climate Data Rescue - Africa (CliDaR) project was initiated in 2022 by the team to preserve and digitize critical meteorological surface observations from ACMAD. The project enlisted the help of second-year university undergraduates at Maynooth University to digitise these valuable records. During the two successive CliDaR initiatives in 2023 and 2024, students digitized over 245,000 observations from Madagascar and 71,000 from the Central African Republic (CAR).These efforts produced unique datasets for five stations in Madagascar and two in CAR, encompassing sub-daily observations of cloud cover, temperature, humidity, evaporation, pressure, and wind. Additionally, they included daily observations of evaporation, precipitation, and temperature. The newly digitized African datasets significantly enhance both the temporal and spatial coverage in this data-scarce region, which is critical for conducting impactful climate change studies.

Please note that for the daily datasets, the given hour is just allocated by C3S and is not really used when analysing the data by a user, so it is irrelevant.