SEA-HISTIN: An inventory of historical weather observations of Southeast Asia

Teleti, Praveen; Williamson, Fiona

doi:10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459

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https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459

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24 Jul 2026

| 24 Jul 2026

SEA-HISTIN: An inventory of historical weather observations of Southeast Asia

Praveen Teleti and Fiona Williamson

Abstract. Understanding past climate is essential for extreme weather risk preparedness and planning. Southeast Asia suffers from an acute scarcity of historical weather observations, partly due to a lack of information on the existence and location of historical data sources. Here, we address this challenge by presenting SEA-HISTIN, the largest known inventory of historical weather data sources for Southeast Asia, cataloguing diverse materials ranging from government and institutional records, bulletins, and ship logbooks, identified across archives in the UK, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States. The inventory documents over 1,900 terrestrial station records and more than 10,000 marine voyages spanning roughly two centuries, with detailed metadata on location, observation period, variables, instrumentation, and data source quality compiled following international best-practice guidelines. Its relational structure separates source documents from individual stations and ships, supporting flexible extension as new record types are discovered. Beyond its scientific value for reconstructing rainfall trends, droughts, and floods, the inventory connects historical weather to broader social history, including epidemics, famines, and migration patterns shaped by climate extremes. Released as an open, versioned dataset, SEA-HISTIN is designed to guide future data-rescue priorities, foster international collaboration through initiatives such as ACRE, and make historical climate records more accessible to researchers and the public alike.

Received: 12 Jun 2026 – Discussion started: 24 Jul 2026

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Praveen Teleti and Fiona Williamson

Status: final response (author comments only)

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2026-3459', Anonymous Referee #1, 03 Sep 2026

This paper is the fruit of tedious, carefully executed work. The authors are to be applauded. The listed sources might in fact contribute significantly to improved products and to improved understanding of climate and atmospheric circulation in Southeast Asia.
The procedure is rigorous and the criteria and methods are described in detail. The paper is well structured and well written. I have some more technical comments (see below). I recommend the paper for publication after revisions. This is an excellent contribution to the literature and to the data rescue community.

Comments:
- Did you also consider graphical data (such as thermo-barographs etc.)?
- The inventory seems to list surface data only, please state this explicitly. It is confusing because you show a balloon launch.
- I am also confused about Table 1, which also lists transcribed data, and the main file suggests this is a large portion if not the majority. From the text I understood the inventory to list un-transcribed records. Could you perhaps clarify?
- Your tables mark corrections (e.g., units), but do you also mark records that have been homogenised or merged?
- It would be interesting to show a figure of the amount of information per different variables, if this is possible (I know this might be more difficult)
- The station table lists the resolution, and this is exclusively monthly. Are there no daily or subdaily station data?
- I realise that there are also many other columns whose category is always the same. In the main file completeness is always "continuous", quantitative is always TRUE, legibility is always "high" etc. for many others. The same holds for the station file: Is pressure really always reduced to sea level?
- For all sources, copyright is listed as "public". However, I still think it is a rather delicate issue. I know that legally, facts or raw data cannot be owned nor copyrighted. However, there is still some kind of ownership in the data, and this ownership may not be with the person transcribing the data. Do you have any advice for the reader on how to proceed? Given the colonial history of many of the observations, this is might be relevant.
- Avoid "Govt", "Dept" etc.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Praveen Rao Teleti, 16 Oct 2026
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3459/egusphere-2026-3459-AC1-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2026-3459', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Sep 2026
General comments:
This paper presents an extremely detailed and granular inventory of historical weather observations in southeast Asia, which will be invaluable in the prioritisation of data rescue efforts, but also for researchers in other fields with an interest in climate and environmental history. Their research is to be highly commended. It is particularly good to see the breadth of sources considered here, including ships' logbooks, and to see that the inventory reaches across national borders both with respect to geographical coverage and archival repositories. The authors clearly and appropriately identify the significance of the work, insofar as without such inventories there is a risk of "duplicated effort, overlooked sources, and the continued loss of records whose very existence is undocumented".
My specific comments and suggestions below are therefore relatively minor:
Lines 110-111: Rephrase sentence: "Drawing on nine archives across Vietnam and France, filling a large gap in the regional record."

Lines 161-162: The authors note that the data sources are also an "excellent record of socio-economic history of the region". Are the authors able to provide one or two specific examples of this from any of the sources in the inventory, such that an environmental historian could get an idea of whether and how documents containing meteorological observations make any direct observations on weather impacts? This could better illustrate the broader importance of the work beyond the data rescue community. Also, line 161 is missing "an" between "also" and "excellent".

Line 217: "All these records were stored in paper form or scanned, but over the time" - remove "the" between "over" and time"

Line 219: Remove "The" before "Table 1"

Line 225: Remove "the" before Appendix A.

Line 271: Add a colon after "documents"

Line 312: Change "govt" to "government"

Lines 331-332, missing word: "MetOffice UK maintained stations and published weather observations before local weather services were formed, we searched MetOffice UK’ National Meteorological archive (NMA) for relevant documents."

Line 354: change "were vessel" to "where vessels"

Line 545: rephrase "Every secondary record resolve to a valid parent document"

The future work section of the paper is particularly interesting and important in a paper like this, though I feel it could go a little further, especially considering the depth of work that the authors have put into it over a long period of time. For example, can the authors say something about the transferable lessons the inventory provides for data rescue efforts in other regions of Asia or the world? And, given that the inventory was assembled over two decades through the persistence of the authors, should inventories be a priority for time and resource investment for researchers working in other regions?

Note that a number of these specific points relate to typos/language errors. I may have missed some of these, so I would recommend the authors give the manuscript another careful read before resubmission.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Praveen Rao Teleti, 16 Oct 2026
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3459/egusphere-2026-3459-AC2-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459-AC2
RC3:
'Comment on egusphere-2026-3459', Anonymous Referee #3, 18 Sep 2026

This paper documents work to catalogue potential sources of historical weather observations in Southeast Asia. While a somewhat unusual paper given its lack of data analysis, the archive it describes will provide a valuable base for future work and I recommend publication of the paper subject to generally minor revisions.

Major comments

The exact geographic scope of the study is a little unclear. At L138-141, the wording here suggests that the geographic scope of the inventory is narrower than suggested by Figure 1 (which includes Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar – noting that the first three are covered by Thomas (2025)). May need some clarification. I do note that Figure 5 includes reference to stations in Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar, with none in Cambodia (or Timor-Leste), although Cambodia is included in Table 3. (There do not seem to be any sources specific to the former French colonies in Table 1 – presumably this means that the material you are getting for those countries is coming from region-wide sources such as ASEAN?).

If the intention here is not to duplicate Thomas (2025), I think it would be worth saying that that study complements the work here.

(As an aside, I saw the impressively large Vietnamese meteorological service archive of printed volumes – which our hosts said was evacuated to the countryside during the Vietnam War – on a visit to Hanoi in 2007).

Minor comments

L64-72 – as I understand it, some parts of the region (e.g. Malaysia) also have restrictive policies for access to historical data held by the national meteorological service – is this an issue for the time period considered in this paper?

L70 – 'turbulent post-war and decolonisation periods' – some parts of the region experienced significant armed conflict at times during this period (perhaps not so much the subset of the region that is the primary focus of the paper – it would presumably have been a major issue in Cambodia, in particular). Worth mentioning?

L114-122 – a significant constraint on long-term assessments of the Indian Ocean Dipole is a lack of SST observations in the eastern IOD node (west of Sumatra and Java) pre-1960. Do these projects address that gap at all?

Section 3.1 – while the searches described here are broad-ranging, presumably the potential exists for further material to emerge (I imagine documents in languages other than English would be especially challenging to locate). Is this worth acknowledging in the text?

There are some minor English language issues and typos in the text – a further proofread would be useful.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459-RC3
- AC3: 'Reply on RC3', Praveen Rao Teleti, 16 Oct 2026
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3459/egusphere-2026-3459-AC3-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459-AC3

Praveen Teleti and Fiona Williamson

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3459-supplement

Data sets

SEA-HISTIN: An inventory of historical weather observations of Southeast Asia P. Teleti and F. Williamson https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20663521

Praveen Teleti and Fiona Williamson

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Short summary

Southeast Asia suffers from acute scarcity of historical weather observations due to lack of information on existence and location of historical data-sources. Here, we address the challenge by presenting the largest inventory of historical data-sources for Southeast Asia, cataloguing diverse sources. The inventory can record comprehensive meta-data yet flexible to accommodate new data-sources. We hope this inventory will encourage more data-rescue efforts and fill in the existing data gap.


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