Thousands of pages of handwritten weather logs from the Congo Basin are being digitised to fill a major gap in long-term climate monitoring in the region. Researchers say the new dataset helps track changes in extreme heat and rainfall that have been difficult for the IPCC to quantify previously due to limited readily available observations.
The work draws on historical records held in archives, including the paper collections of the Institut National pour l'Etude et la Recherche Agronomiques (INERA) in Yangambi, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the State Archives of Belgium. Using these data, the study led by Vrije Universiteit Brussel reports a warming signal across the Congo Basin that emerges from records beginning in the 1960s and continues over subsequent decades.
Outlets describe the results as showing that very hot days become much more frequent over time, with one report stating the share of hot days nearly doubles in about two decades. Together, the coverage frames the digitisation effort as both a new source of evidence and a step toward better understanding regional climate change where monitoring has lagged.
