250 years of daily weather: Temperature and precipitation fields for Switzerland since 1763

Abstract. Climate reconstructions give insights into monthly and seasonal climate variability of the past few hundred years. However, for understanding past extreme weather events and for relating them to impacts, for example to periods of extreme floods or to yield losses, reconstructions on a daily time scale are needed. Here, we present a data set of 250 years of daily temperature and precipitation fields for Switzerland from 1763 to 2020, which has been created using early instrumental data. The temperature reconstruction shows even for an early period before 1800 with scarce data availability good results, especially in the Swiss Plateau. For the precipitation reconstruction, skills are considerably lower, which can be related to the few precipitation measurements available and the heterogeneous nature of precipitation. By means of a case study on the wet and cold years from 1769 to 1772, which triggered wide-spread famine across Europe, we show that this dataset allows more detailed analyses than hitherto possible.