COBECORE will contribute to ACRE and the ISPD

As outlined in the research proposal of COBECORE the data contained within the historical NILCO archives have significant importance towards reconstructing the past climate across the Congo Basin and the central African continent.

Within this context COBECORE will contribute barometric pressure measurements at 7 site locations across the Congo Basin (more data might be integrated later). These data will be shared with the ‘Atmospheric Circulation Reconstruction over the Earth (ACRE)’ project and integrated through the ‘International Surface Pressure Database (ISPD)’.

Similar to COBECORE, ACRE allies several partners and citizen science platforms to facilitate data rescue and recovery of historical climate records of both marine and terrestrial sensor data.

As shown in the map below, very few surface pressure measurements exist on the African continent during the late 1930’s. However, we hope to fill some of these gaps in knowledge and further constrain global atmospheric re-analysis models through our contributions.

Fig 1. - new surface pressure stations throughout the Congo Basin. (current ISPD stations as red dots, new COBECORE stations as blue dots)