Abstract
Cli-DaRe@School is a citizen science project, started in spring 2022, whose main goal is to make a remarkable step forward toward the digitization of the huge heritage of historical Italian meteorological observations. These are still largely unexploited, as many records are only available on paper or as scanned images. In the first year, the project focused on four comprehensive monographs including about 6000 records of monthly temperature and precipitation data. A team of 334 students from 10 different high schools in Italy was engaged. Each school was assigned pdf files containing the scanned pages to digitize, along with spreadsheet templates for data entry and related tutorials. The person-hours dedicated to data digitization were about 4000, making about 4000 pages digitized. Students had the opportunity to join a training program consisting of seminars to delve into various aspects of climate change and meteorology, and specific activities aimed to make them aware of the potentialities of the recovered data. Cli-DaRe@School is an important two-fold initiative: It demonstrated the potentialities of high school students in providing an enormous contribution to past meteorological data rescue and proved to be of great educational value, offering young students an easy hands-on experience with climate data and making them more conscious of how science investigates past climatic trends. Therefore, we decided to continue with this experience and to make Cli-DaRe@School a permanent project to be offered to schools every year.