Methodology:

Signy Station was established by the United Kingdom in 1944 on Signy Island and operated as a year-round meteorological station from 1947 to 1995. A description of the station can be found at https://www.bas.ac.uk/polar-operations/sites-and-facilities/facility/signy/.

For the first time, the Signy meteorological record is made available continuously from 1947 to 1994. Paper-based historical weather observations collected at Signy Station during 1947 - 1954 and 1970 - 1981 have recently been digitized by a team at the British Antarctic Survey. The team developed an automated deep-learning Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model which extracts the records from scanned versions of the paper copies automatically. The OCR model output was then put through a series of quality control procedures including human examination of the outputs. Records outside these periods that already existed in electronic form have also been quality controlled

Data collection:

More about how the data were collected and the instrumentation can be found at https://legacy.bas.ac.uk/met/READER/metadata/Signy.html.

Data quality:

Early observations at Signy Station were taken at the standard synoptic hours (i.e., 00, 06, 12, 18 UTC) during 1947 - 1949 and then every three hours during 1950 - 1974. The records became twice daily (at 00 and 12 UTC) during 1975 - 1983 but mostly only one observation per day (at 12 UTC) during 1976 - 1981. The collection interval returned to the standard synoptic hours during 1984 - 1987. Automated collection of data then started around late 1988, which provided hourly data during 1989 - 1994.