Historical storms and floods: back to 1720 with Bologna meteorological data

The Bologna series, 1716 onwards, is a rare example of complete and continuous daily meteorological observations, although some gaps are included. The partial utilization of the longest series is principally due to the difficulty in transcription and comprehension of the original manuscripts. Moreover, making a homogeneous sequence of extracted meteorological data from an early series is a truly difficult task. The study of the Bologna series is essentially interdisciplinary, involving a number of connections of several types to gather and interpret the recorded measurements and the corresponding descriptions of damages caused to people and farming by extreme events. This study has been carried out by analyzing the intense precipitation events found in the early part of the series (1722-1726). Not only the data have been exploited, but also the metadata, exploiting the included notes, which, sometimes, describe atmospheric phenomena and incurred damages.