Abstract
Billions of historical climatological observations remainunavailable to science as they exist only on paper, stored in numerousarchives around the world. The conversion of these data from paper todigital could transform our understanding of historical climate variations,including extreme weather events. Here we demonstrate how the rescue of suchpaper observations has improved our understanding of a severe windstorm thatoccurred in February 1903 and its significant impacts. By assimilating newlyrescued atmospheric pressure observations, the storm is now crediblyrepresented in an improved reanalysis of the event. In some locations thisstorm produced stronger winds than any event during the modern period(1950-2015) and it is in the top-4 storms for strongest winds anywhere overland in England and Wales. As a result, estimates of risk from severestorms, based on modern period data, may need to be revised. Examining theatmospheric structure of the storm suggests that it is a classicShapiro-Keyser-type cyclone with "sting-jet" precursors and associatedextreme winds at locations and times of known significant damage. Comparisonwith both independent observations and qualitative information, such asphotographs and written accounts, provides additional evidence of thecredibility of the atmospheric reconstruction, including sub-dailyrainfall variations. Simulations of the storm surge resulting from thisstorm show a large coastal surge of around 2.5 m, comparing favourably withnewly rescued tide gauge observations and adding to our confidence in thereconstruction. Combining historical rescued weather observations withmodern reanalysis techniques has allowed us to plausibly reconstruct asevere windstorm and associated storm surge from more than 100 years ago,establishing an invaluable end-to-end tool to improve assessments of risksfrom extreme weather.