Historical reports on weather conditions are an extremely valuable source of information for weather and climate enthusiasts. Since 1911, monthly weather conditions have been continuously documented in the Swiss weather yearbooks, the Annual Reports, compiled by the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, formerly known in German as the “Schweizerische Meteorologische Zentralanstalt”.
In the first few years after the beginning of measurements in 1864, the Annual Reports of the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology mainly served as a database in the form of extensive tables. Descriptions of monthly weather conditions have appeared in the Annual Reports since the year 1911. Until 2010, the Annual Reports contained all the yearly and monthly weather reports. Since 2011, the yearly weather is documented in the Climate Report, the follow-up product of the Annual Reports. Since then, the digital versions of the monthly weather reports can be accessed through the MeteoSwiss website.
Beside the monthly weather conditions the Annual Reports also include lots of interesting information on extreme events. Nowadays, such reports of extreme events are still of immeasurable value for climatological analyses.
With the publication of these comprehensive Annual Reports, the historical Swiss weather and climate data base is made available for the general public. MeteoSwiss wishes all those interested an informative and entertaining look back into Switzerland's weather and climate history.
Climate Report since 2011 (German)
Climate Bulletin 2011 (German):
The monthly, seasonal and annual Climate Bulletin, showing the evolution of the monthly, seasonal and annual weather conditions
Historical reports about the evolution of the yearly weather are also available for the years before 1911. Over the recent decades, the Historical Institute of the University of Bern has built a large data base of historical weather observations, called Euro-Climhist . Short versions of the information out of this data base are made available here for the years since 1861. The Swiss Magazine for Forestry and the Papers for Healthcare serve as a source of historical weather for the earliest part of this period. For the years 1866 and 1867 as well as for the years from 1873 to 1881, however, these sources do not contain any information on yearly weather. Since 1911, this information is taken from the Annual Reports of the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology.