Stockholm Historical Weather Observations
Daily weather observations have been carried out since 1754 at the Stockholm old astronomical observatory and the measurement series is one of the world's longest unbroken records. The first observer was the secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the astronomer and statistician Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin (1717-1783). He is known in the Swedish science history as the father of Swedish population statistics and for his studies of Jupiter's moons. Weather observations are still made at the observatory, but now under the auspices of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI). The World Meteorological Organization recognizes this site as a Long-term observing station, implying that it is considered as highly important for climate science due to its long-term sustainable observational standards and high-quality time series data. Stockholm has even the longest observational record of all sites on their list. Data back to 1756 for observations of air temperature, air pressure and cloud amounts are available for download below.
Download data
More information
A fact sheet from the SMHI about the Stockholm weather observations can be found here.
The SMHI web site also provides short information in Swedish about the Stockholm temperature series, including a graph showing the annnual mean temperature series.
Winter-to-spring temperatures have also been estimated back to the year 1502, by combining the temperature observations with historical documentation about when the sailing season in Stockholm harbour started in each spring. Read more about this here.
A list of references to publications that discuss the Stockholm historical weather observations is found here.
Contact
For questions regarding the data set, please contact Anders Moberg via email at the address
Drawing of a balloon ascent at the Stockholm Observatory in 1784 in the presence of King Gustav III. The original document is available in the archive of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin's meteorological observation journal page for January 1756. The original document is available in the archive of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
