IEDRO volunteers meet with the “owners” of the data to be rescued virtually or in person. All parties sign an agreement to allow the rescued and digitized environment data to be freely available through an open and unrestricted database. A tentative implementation schedule is set.

The IEDRO volunteers assist the country’s national meteorological service to prepare the data rescue facility, purchase and install computer and scanning or camera equipment, and train the data rescue personnel.

Records at risk are inventoried to identify medium (paper, microfilm, strip charts), types of data, time periods and measurement locations or stations with an aim to identifying priorities for rescue, setting a scope for the project.

Imaging methods used depend on the medium. Sometimes scanning equipment can be used but often photographing the records is the best approach. In that case, each sheet of observations is oriented on a stand so that the entire page of data is visible to the camera. When the image is in focus, the photograph is taken, with precautions to flatten the sheet. When the camera’s memory is full, the images are downloaded into the computer and saved to portable storage media.

After the weather or other environmental data is captured, the images are digitized using methods such as the strip chart digitizer program, the Weather Wizards web application, or another method chosen for delivering the best results in the shortest period of time within the project budget.

IEDRO receives the photographic/scanned images of the original environmental data (i.e. alphanumeric weather observations, graphs, photographs, etc.) on a thumb drive or via the cloud. We then log the images received and send a complete copy to the nearest environmental World Data Center – NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in Asheville, North Carolina.