HIST-DAILY, a dataset of daily and sub-daily European weather observations before 1900

HIST-DAILY is a dataset of daily and sub-daily European weather observations made before 1900. It brings together 1,804 harmonized time series from 482 locations across Europe, the Mediterranean basin, northern Africa, the Middle East, central Asia, and the eastern Atlantic (Azores, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland), spanning observations from 1658-05-25 to 1899-12-31. The dataset integrates series from published sources, institutional archives, and original manuscript digitizations carried out at the University of Bern (23.3% of series), delivered in a common Station Exchange Format (SEF) with harmonized units (°C, hPa, mm, degrees), calendar (Gregorian), and time reference (UTC). All series were quality-controlled using the dataresqc R package, with QC flags retained at the level of individual observations rather than removing flagged values. 26.0% of the dataset is published here for the first time. The dataset is intended to support daily and sub-daily weather reconstructions and studies of historical extreme events. It is not recommended for deriving long-term climatic trends due to remaining inhomogeneities and gaps in the observational record. The deposit contains two zip archives: original.zip (source data as received, for transparency and traceability) and SEF.zip (the harmonized, analysis-ready series), plus inventory.csv, a flat-file index for discovering series by station, variable, period, or source. Full documentation of the file structure, variable list, and processing methodology is provided in the accompanying readme.md.