New Delhi: Researchers have digitised thousands of handwritten records to understand how the Congo Basin has adapted to climate change giving clues into the long-mysterious history of the country’s warming climate.
The study, titled “From paper to proof: revealing Congo Basin warming through rescued climate archives” was published in the European Geosciences Union on 12 October by a team of researchers from Congo and Belgium. The study focused on reconstructing historical weather records to understand how temperatures and extreme weather events have changed over time in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
“The Congo Basin is home to some of the world’s most vulnerable populations and is experiencing rapid demographic growth in both urban and rural areas. These populations are increasingly exposed to climate-related hazards, such as landslides and gully erosion, which are further exacerbated by human-induced land transformation associated with population growth,” read the study.
The study added that satellite data suggest the Congo Basin has experienced a drying trend in recent decades, characterized by reductions in precipitation, canopy water content, and forest photosynthetic capacity.
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Digitising hand-written records
To better understand this climate, researchers digitised 9,885 sheets of weather observations from 37 weather stations in the DRC. The records contained over a million temperature and rainfall observations which the research community did not know of earlier.
The team of researchers worked with historical records from the DRC and records preserved in the Belgian archives spanning 1908 to 2023. They photographed the sheets and used a machine-learning tool to transcribe the data before eventually verifying it.
The findings revealed that the Congo Basin has warmed significantly since 1961 and 1990, during which the median increase in daily temperature was about 0.15 degrees Celsius per decade, leading to a temperature rise of 0.5 degrees Celsius over 30 years.
The hot days became far more frequent and nearly doubled between the 1960s and 1990s. Of the three weather stations that had recorded significant rainfall data, two of the stations showed that heavy rainfall events had gotten more frequent over time, but the third showed no major change.
“Overall, this analysis of rescued weather data from Central Africa highlights the urgent need to close the knowledge gap on climate trends in the Congo Basin, one of the world’s most data-sparse yet climatically significant regions,” read the study.
While the newly digitised records allow a better understanding of the region, the study’s authors highlight that the findings alone cannot establish that the changes were caused by climate change.