Engaging High School Students in Rescuing and Digitizing Data from Historical Observations in Italy: The Citizen Science Project Cli-DaRe@School

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Cli-DaRe@School is a citizen science project, started in spring 2022, whose main goal is to make a remarkable step forward toward the digitization of the huge heritage of historical Italian meteorological observations. These are still largely unexploited, as many records are only available on paper or as scanned images. In the first year, the project focused on four comprehensive monographs including about 6000 records of monthly temperature and precipitation data. A team of 334 students from 10 different high schools in Italy was engaged. Each school was assigned pdf files containing the scanned pages to digitize, along with spreadsheet templates for data entry and related tutorials. The person-hours dedicated to data digitization were about 4000, making about 4000 pages digitized. Students had the opportunity to join a training program consisting of seminars to delve into various aspects of climate change and meteorology, and specific activities aimed to make them aware of the potentialities of the recovered data. Cli-DaRe@School is an important two-fold initiative: It demonstrated the potentialities of high school students in providing an enormous contribution to past meteorological data rescue and proved to be of great educational value, offering young students an easy hands-on experience with climate data and making them more conscious of how science investigates past climatic trends. Therefore, we decided to continue with this experience and to make Cli-DaRe@School a permanent project to be offered to schools every year. Significance Statement Meteorological archives worldwide contain considerable amounts of data available only on paper and, therefore, not easily usable for research. The cause is mainly the lack of resources for their digitization. This work, presenting the digitization of about 4000 pages of meteorological data performed by high school students, demonstrates how citizen science is an amazing resource for recovering this remarkable cultural heritage, achieving a two-fold benefit: contributing to scientific research through massive digitization of meteorological archives and training young generations by raising their awareness of the environment and climate change.