Description: This dataset provides early instrumental data recovered in Latin-America and the Caribbean. Data have been retrieved from 20 countries (Argentina, Bahamas, Belize, Brazil, British Guiana, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, France (Martinique and Guadalupe), Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, El Salvador and Suriname) and they cover the 18th and 19th centuries. The main meteorological variables retrieved are air temperature, atmospheric pressure and precipitation but other variables, such as humidity, wind direction, or state of the sky have been retrieved when possible. In total, more than 300.000 early instrumental observations have been rescued. Each archive shows a headline with the following information: ID: 6 letters, the first three make reference to the country and the last three letters to the city/location of the observations. Country: Current name of the country where the observation were recorded. City: Current name of the city or location where the observation were recorded. Period: Time period covered by the series at monthly scale when possible. Resolution: Time resolution of the series. Observers: Name of the people that recorded the measurements. Location Observatory: Latitude and longitude of the observatory in WGS84, altitude when available. The name of the observatory or the street where it was is provided, when the location is exactly known. When the precise location is unknown a probable latitude and longitude is provided. Meteorological variables: Describe all the meteorological variables recorded, its units and the corresponding columns in the file. Data source: The complete reference of the documentary source in which the meteorological record was provided. Descriptive Name: A name of the archive that makes reference to the location and the period covered by the series. Other comments: All the metadata rescued about the observations or the observer. Also provides extreme or rare events recorded by the observer and any other information that could be useful to interpret the series. After the headline, the first columns give the temporal information of the record (year, season, month, day and hour) and the following columns show the measurements of each meteorological variable. Every column has a short descriptive title.

Description: We report the rescue and processing completion of the first multiyear set of stratospheric aerosols lidar measurements. They were conducted at Lexington, MA between January 1964 and August 1965 and some additional measurements conducted at Fairbanks, AK between July and August 1964. The processing of the rescued lidar scattering ratio profiles was aimed to determine the stratospheric aerosols extinction profiles (sAEP) and the stratospheric aerosols optical depth. Contemporary nearby measurements of atmospheric variables were used with that aim (sAOD). Atmospheric soundings of temperature, and pressure were used to determine the molecular backscattering profiles and ozone soundings to determine the ozone absorption profiles. Those former profiles served to determine the molecular and ozone two way transmittances corrections profiles. Stratospheric aerosols two way transmittances corrections profiles were determined by a cyclic processing combining the sAEP and the total aerosols turbidity measurements. A comparison was conducted between the sAEP and sAOD calculated using the soundings and the 1962 US standard atmosphere. The two way transmittance corrections were not applied in this case, resulting in slightly lower values of both variables in the case of soundings. The two way transmittance correction was applied to the sAEP based in the fact that it was not applied in the originary processing producing the lidar scattering ratio profiles we rescued. It was reason to consider that the aerosols backscatter derived directly from it were in fact the aerosol attenuated backscatter. The magnitudes of the differences in the aerosols extinction between the corrected and uncorrected two way transmittances results show an increase of 72 % for Lexington and 26 % for Fairbanks. For the sAOD the increase is 66 % and 26 % respectively. The comparison of the magnitudes of the aerosol extinction and sAOD with the few contemporary available measurements reported show a better agreement in the case of the two way transmittance corrected variables. At Lexington the sAEP cross- sections and the sAOD vs time plot show the presence of three maximums between January 1964 and August 1965, with the last having higher magnitudes of the aerosol extinction and sAOD in contradiction what it would be expected for the Mt Agung decaying stratospheric aerosols. In search for an explanation we found contemporary and updated references to other two volcanic eruptions the Trident volcano in Alaska and the Vestmannaeyjar volcano south of Iceland, both with plumes above the tropopause.. The first reported to have erupted in April and October- November 1963 and also in May 1964. The second between November 1963 and the middle of 1964. A detailed analysis of the uncertainties of the several intermediate variables involved in the processing conducting to derive the sAEP for each site was conducted. The two way transmittance uncorrected aerosols extinction values relative error magnitudes were 54 % for Fairbanks and 44 % Lexington. The corrected aerosols extinction values relative error magnitudes were 61 % and 64 % respectively. The analysis of the uncertainties pointed to the variables that, upon an extended rescue process and further reprocessing may improve the reported relative error levels.

Description: The dataset consists of two ship-borne aerosols scattering ratio lidar datasets in the early stages of the stratospheric aerosols produced by the June 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption. The Russian vessel Prof. Zubov ship Atlantic transect from Europe to the Caribbean from July to September 1991 and Prof. Vize ship transect from Europe to south of the Equator between January and February 1992. All the 48 reported measurements at the Prof. Zubov were rescued but only 11 of the 20 measurements conducted by Prof. Vize were found. We used the same algorithms and parameters appearing in the only two articles published with this datasets to reproduce the aerosols extinction values those papers reported and showed in its figures. Following this criteria the CIRA-86 atmosphere was used to derive the molecular backscattering, vertical and temporal constant values of the aerosols backscattering to extinction ratio and for the correction factor of the aerosols backscattering wavelength dependence. The dataset consists of profiles of lidar aerosols backscattering to extinction profiles ratios and the derived aerosols backscattering and aerosols extinction profiles. Each profile contains information about the latitude, longitude, date and time it was measured.

Description: The datasets consist of rescued and recalibrated tropospheric and stratospheric aerosol extinction profiles (β_p (z)) measured at New Mexico, US, (32°47'N, 105°49'W) between December 1963 and December 1964, after the 1963 Agung volcanic eruption (Antuña-Marrero et al., 2022). Measurements were conducted with a searchlight, the lidar predecessor. The rescue procedure re-digitized the 105 original β_p (z) plots (β_p^Orig (z)) from a research report (Elterman, 1966). The recalibration procedure began with the inversion of the original equation used to compute β_p (z) (Elterman, 1966) to retrieve the normalized detector response profiles for each one of the 105 digitized β_p^Orig (z) profiles. Then the cited equation was used in straight form to compute the recalibrated β_p^Orig (z) profiles (β_p^Recal (z)) replacing several of the variables it includes by their updated versions. These include: 1) The molecular extinction profile, replacing the US Standard Atmosphere 1962 with the corresponding daily local sounding nearby; 2) The molecular and aerosol transmissions, replaced with calculations using the MODTRAN (MODerate resolution atmospheric TRANsmission) code in transmission mode; and 3) The aerosol phase function, substituting the one calculated from measurements at the surface in Germany and applied for the entire 2.76 to 35.2 km column, with, for the troposphere, 2.76 to 10.7 km, the AERONET aerosol phase function from White Sands High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility (HELSTF), and for the stratosphere, 11.2 - 35.2 km, the aerosol phase function calculated from a set of particle size distributions measured by the ER-2 in the vicinity of White Sands in early 1964. Errors were estimated taking as a reference the errors determined in the computation of β_p^Orig (z).