A weather record kept in the National Institute for Agronomic Studies and Research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Derrick Muheki

The Congo Basin is one of the few places on Earth where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has failed to track the long-term shift in extreme heat and rainfall. The reason is a lack of readily available data. To fill this gap, scientists have digitized thousands of handwritten weather records, which reveal the impact of warming in the region.

The records , recovered from archives in Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, span the years 1908 to 2023. To digitize the data, scientists had to scan more than 9,000 pages that together included more than a million observations.

“Seeing how fragile these paper archives were as I was visiting [the archive in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] made me realize how urgent this data rescue work is,” said Derrick Muheki , a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.…