An online digital archive of magnetograms from 1846 to 1987

The magnetic measurements from current UK observatories, together with those from their historical predecessors, provide some of the longest running continuous sets of geophysical observations in the world. A campaign to capture high quality digital images of >300,000 analogue magnetograms (front and back) was completed in 2013, with every single image now available to search, view and download from the on-line archive at www.bgs.ac.uk/data/magnetograms. In parallel with the capture of the magnetograms, the related published yearbooks were scanned and are available online as PDF documents at www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/data_service/data/yearbooks/yearbooks.html. This work has helped to ensure that these valuable long-term data sets are not lost, irrespective of what may happen in the future to the original photographic paper records. The additional benefit of immediate worldwide access to the data contained within these historic documents has also been established. In this paper we present the BGS OpenGeoscience service, which the magnetogram image archive forms part of. We also show some results of on-going work to acquire digital data from the images and the yearbooks. We discuss past and potential future use of the data for scientific research, such as space weather studies of the magnetograms during the period of the Carrington storm and studies into the homogeneity of long term geomagnetic activity indices that are used in space climate research