The Climate Archives of Indochina - And their contribution in understanding climate change in Vietnam and Southeast Asia

This article presents a new historical climate database called Climate data rescue of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It covers the period from 1867 to 1973. The oldest data were produced by military hospitals according to methods prescribed by the Ministry of the Navy since 1851, then from 1898 onwards by the Indochina Meteorological Service, which developed a vast network of meteorological and rainfall stations throughout the Indochinese peninsula. The data are very abundant (temperature, atmospheric pressure, precipitation, insolation, etc.). The article presents both their diversity and the diversity of their media, as well as the history of their journey between Vietnam and France since the 1950s. It describes the various research steps that led to the recovery of the data and their centralization in a single data depository to make them available to the scientific community.