As part of Biodiversity Week 2025, Dr Carla Mateus delivered a lunchtime lecture in the Royal Irish Academy on the topic of historical meteorological records held in the Academy Library's archive collections.

Historical meteorological observations are crucial to better assess past climate variability and trends and the frequency, intensity, duration, and distribution of extreme weather events, and to put the current climate change into historical context. The records preserved in the archives of the Royal Irish Academy date from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century and are of cultural and scientific importance. Many of the records were sent to the Academy by diligent observers interested in science and the arts, others were collated in response to an Academy initiative to organise a system of meteorological observations in Ireland in the period 1850-52.

This lecture highlights the role of the Royal Irish Academy as a curator of historical meteorological records across the Island of Ireland, as a publisher of diverse papers on instrumentation and meteorological observations, and as a learned body which encouraged a standardised approach for reliable weather recording.

The meteorological records include observations of air temperature, maximum and minimum air temperatures, wet bulb, sea temperature, rainfall, pressure, wind direction and force, cloud cover and weather remarks. Many well-known historical extreme weather events are covered by instrumental observations and documentary weather remarks, such as storms and air temperature extremes.

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