Bolivia Data Rescue Project
Hundreds of bound volumes of weather data waiting to help agriculture, water resources, energy and economic policies.
Status: Paused
Weather Data Locked in Books
The Bolivian national meteorological and hydrological agency “SENAMI” has recorded temperature, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, and rainfall on data forms bound into hundreds of volumes. Unfortunately, data in bound books is functionally invisible and at risk of loss.
Country involved
Bolivia
Contact on Site
Servicio Nacional de Meteorología e Hidrología (SENAMHI)
Contact in IEDRO
Dr. Pedro Restrepo, Ph.D.
Funding Sources
None
Project Status
Paused
Data Rescued
IEDRO has images of over sixteen thousand pages of data but these have been neither digitized nor made available pending instructions from SENAMHI.
Why is this project specifically important?
Once digitized, the historical data from Bolivia can better inform their policies for agriculture, water resources, energy, and the economy.
The benefits of digitized data are not limited to Bolivia’s borders.
Once in digital form, these historical data on temperature, wind, pressure, and rainfall will be added into the database at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), one of the World Meteorological Organization’s world Data Centers for Meteorology and Climatology. This allows users worldwide to freely access these data, making Bolivia’s historic weather data of enormous value to scientists researching regional and global climate change processes, conducting hindcast studies, and evaluating climate models.
Updates on Our Project
January 2023: After a 10 year hiatus, IEDRO decided to proceed with rescuing and digitizing those images from SENAMHI in our possession, hoping to renew our cooperation. IEDRO volunteer Chuck Olessker is organizing the images received in 2013 for use in the Weather Wizards digitization platform.
This includes grouping by form layout and extracting their dates and stations to determine whether those records are already available in digital form in the NCEI archives.
September 2013: IEDRO personnel began receiving surface data images from Bolivia. To date, IEDRO has received synoptic observations and Summary of Day observations for 22 surface stations – 16,544 pages/records in total, the equivalent of at least 10 years of data. Unfortunately, contact with SENAMHI was broken and requests for further information were not returned.
July 2012: IEDRO installed free online software to assist in the efficient and continuous flow of data from SENAMHI to IEDRO.
April 2012: Dr. LeDuc led a second IEDRO data rescue team to La Paz, Bolivia. IEDRO’s South American Program Manager, Darío Damián DiFranco, and IEDRO’s Manager of Scientific Applications, Teddy Allen, accompanied her on this trip. IEDRO purchased and installed a computer system with a stand to mount the camera for digitizing books. This supported the training of three SENAMHI employees to image, document, and transfer rescued data. Teddy Allen trained SENAMHI staff to use the equipment and provided samples using real data awaiting imaging.
February 2011: IEDRO’s chief scientist, Dr. Sharon LeDuc, Ph.D., met with SENAMHI to discuss data rescue roles and responsibilities between the two organizations. The project goals included supporting data rescue and digitization in Bolivia according to a two-phase project plan. IEDRO also helped coordinate management and implement the project’s technical and administrative aspects. IEDRO provided SENAMHI with a digital camera to support their work.
What are our plans for the future?
Bolivia has many analog strip charts of precipitation data, called pluviograms, that still need to be imaged and digitized. IEDRO is willing to support SENAMHI in this effort if they are interested. There are additional images of forms to be digitized if funding for further data rescue efforts can be obtained, although many of the images in hand are difficult to read.
