Hydrologist Derrick Muheki, originally from south-west Uganda and now a PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, travelled to the DRC to recover paper records held at the INERA archive in Yangambi. The archive contains detailed handwritten logs of temperature and rainfall stretching back decades, but they had never been digitised or published in a form usable by the global climate research community.
In Belgium, Muheki had easy access to colonial-era documents from the Belgian occupation of the Congo (1908-1960), but those records ended after the 1950s. The Yangambi archive held the post-1950s data necessary to build a continuous record. However, unlike the controlled storage conditions of European meteorological logs — "meteorological logs are stored in metal boxes and acid-free paper under controlled temperature and humidity," Muheki said — the Yangambi archives lacked those resources. "In Yangambi, those resources simply aren't available," he explained.
By digitising thousands of pages, the team compiled a dataset that shows the extent of warming in the Congo Basin over the past century. The findings, published in collaboration with researchers from the DRC and Belgium, provide a more complete picture of how the region's climate has changed, an area previously underrepresented in global climate records due to a lack of accessible data.
The study highlights both the scientific value of preserving historical records and the challenges faced by archives in less wealthy nations, where climate data often exists on paper in vulnerable conditions.