Description and objectives

In 2012, ISPRA (Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) completed the Annali Project, digitizing the full content of the Hydrological Yearbooks through comprehensive scanning. While the data are now viewable, any further processing requires their conversion into a digital numerical format.

To make sub-daily resolution time series available, the DATASCAN Project involves scanning the available observation sheets (“cartellini”) from five sectors among those already digitized by ISPRA. For each sector, an effort will be made to identify between 2 and 5 stations with the longest historical series for both precipitation and air temperature data (the product of the number of stations and the series length must not exceed 120 station-years).
Since each observation sheet covers one week, the maximum total number of sheets to be scanned is:
52 weeks × 120 station-years × 5 sectors × 2 variables = 62,400 sheets.

The translation of the research outcomes into this platform involves two main objectives:

1. Development of a robust system for converting paper-based data into digital form.

2. Creation of a large georeferenced dataset of sub-daily rainfall records.