Preprints  

The foundation of the Societas Meteorologica Palatina was the most important step into a physical consideration of meteorology. The organization was exemplary for later observational networks. The data were printed in 12 volumes of Ephemerides being for a long time the most important and reliable data base for scientific research. This data pool is not only of historical interest but is also used in modern research in many fields.

Climate science underwent a rapid expansion in the last decades, associated with ever growing significance for climate policy. On the other hand, climate science is, as all sciences, also a social process. Confronted with these developments, several different series of oral interviews with climate scholars, of different seniority, were done and archived. The present article gives an overview of these interviews, and tries to briefly describe the social context of climate science.

Environmental measurements were undertaken around Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps for four decades, by Dr Reinhold Reiter (1920–1998). This included measurement sites on the Zugspitze and Wank mountains, and the use of an instrumented cable car travelling between Lake Eibsee and the Zugspitze summit. The Mount Wank site operated between 1st August 1972 to 31st December 1983, for which the hourly data values – including atmospheric electricity quantities – have been recovered.

New Zealand’s first tide gauge-based sea level measurements were made in 1773 during James Cook’s second voyage of discovery to the South Pacific. The paper examines the quality of those measurements by comparison with tide predictions based on modern information from locations close to the sites of the 1773 observations. The results show that the quality of their work was of at least a high standard. Whilst of little scientific value today, these measurements are historically significant.