A new dataset of Italian precipitation records for the period 1921–1950 from the Cli-DaRe@School citizen science project

A huge heritage of meteorological data has been accumulated in the Italian archives over the past three centuries. The project Cli-DaRe@School, launched in 2022, aims to carry on a long-term pathway to strengthen citizen science initiatives to rescue these data by engaging high-school students within their “dual training” activities. In the last three years, the project focused on four monographs published by the Italian Hydrographic Service between 1918 and 1966 concerning both monthly precipitation and temperature data. This paper focuses on the largest among these monographs, which is Publication N. 24 of the Italian Hydrographic Service: it is organised in fourteen issues reporting monthly precipitation data for the period 1921–1950 for 3614 stations. About half of the data tables reported in this monograph were digitised within the Cli-DaRe@School project, while the data of the other stations were recovered from the SCIA (Sistema nazionali per la raccolta, l’elaborazione e la diffusione di dati Climatologici di Interesse Ambientale – the national system for the collection, processing, and dissemination of climatological data of environmental interest) dataset produced by Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) and from a large dataset of long-term Italian records jointly set up by the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (CNR-ISAC) and the Milan University (UniMi) in the last 30 years. The scanned images of the monograph are stored and freely accessible in Portable Document Format at https://aisam.eu/progetti/cli-dare-at-school/, while the monthly precipitation data are freely accessible in tabular format at https://zenodo.org/records/15084062. The new dataset presented in this paper has the most complete coverage of monthly precipitation records in Italy for the period 1921–1950, allowing the possibility of analysing the precipitation variability for over a century in the past.