Three centuries of daily precipitation in Padua, Italy, 1713–2018: history, relocations, gaps, homogeneity and raw data

Dario Camuffo (), Antonio della Valle, Francesca Becherini and Valeria Zanini
Additional contact information
Dario Camuffo: National Research Council-Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate
Antonio della Valle: National Research Council-Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate
Francesca Becherini: National Research Council-Institute of Polar Sciences
Valeria Zanini: INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Padova

Climatic Change, 2020, vol. 162, issue 2, No 43, 923-942

Abstract: Abstract Long instrumental records are fundamental to study climate changes, but their reliability and quality have to be checked before any statistical research. Moreover, when metadata are used to solve some problems, data interpretation may change and require further work to refine the series. A thorough revision of the three-century precipitation series in Padua (1713–2018) shows that the results of previous analyses were affected by serious biases. This paper clarifies key features concerning early instruments, exposure, relocation and observational protocols. The daily analysis pointed out a number of problems, bias, irregular sampling and underestimations that have passed unobserved so far. A comparison with the parallel series of Bologna and Venice made it possible to distinguish bias from the climate signal or to reconstruct missing data. The instrumental threshold was recognized to be fundamental to determine the frequency of precipitation, but less important with respect to its amount. This paper provides a methodological example to test the goodness of long instrumental series, in particular to identify problems related to metadata and observations, which is the preliminary step to perform a sound correction and obtain a reliable series. It also includes the set of original raw data, transformed into modern units.

Keywords: Climate change; Precipitation; Early instruments; Raingauge; Long instrumental series; History of meteorology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-020-02717-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:162:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s10584-020-02717-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-020-02717-2

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().