Solar Radiation Data Rescue at Camaguey, Cuba

The earliest solar radiation measurement taken at Camaguey, Cuba was in 1966. The Camaguey Meteorological Station featured a Yanishevsky actinometric instrumentation that was provided by the Hydrometeorological Service of the former Soviet Union. In order to preserve and rescue the data collected during a period of more than 30 years, researchers have developed a low-cost data rescue design, based primarily on using old, out-of-service PCs. The procedure for data rescue consisted of first transferring the original handwritten records to digital form. A special software design was made for data key entering. There have also been a verification process in the data rescue procedure, which then guaranteed that the keyed dataset contained exactly the information recorded in the original notebooks. So far, researchers have keyed and checked the consistency of 20 years worth of data.