Hot days in the Congo Basin nearly doubled, paper weather logs show
Researchers digitized thousands of handwritten sheets from archives in Congo and Belgium. They show a steady rise in heat across a region where ground measurements are scarce.
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Hot days in the Congo Basin became nearly twice as common between the 1960s and the 1980s, according to a peer-reviewed study built on handwritten weather sheets pulled from archives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Belgium.
The paper, titled "From paper to proof: revealing Congo Basin warming through rescued climate archives," was published in Earth System Dynamics on October 12, 2026. Its number is the headline, but the achievement underneath is the data itself.
Central Africa is one of the few regions where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN-backed body that assesses climate science, had not assessed changes in hot extremes or extreme rainfall since the 1950s. The study says the main reason is sparse observations.