Dead Sea historical measurements 1930s to 1970s

Question

I'm looking for historical Dead Sea water levels data. There's a good sequence from 1976 until today on a monthly basis, but there are some graphs that show measurement data from the 1930s.

I'm looking for that data in spreadsheet/table form.

Answer 1

Some reverse image searching gives this Wikipedia citation, which then gives this website, which cites this dead website (wayback machine archive), which hosted a report which contains this PDF page 43

Historical water-level records of the Dead Sea have been reconstructed for a period of over 1,000 years, including the very large rise and fall in water level around the first century B.C. (modified from C. Klein, 1985).

and this PDF page 44

Water-level trends of the Dead Sea respond to measured rainfall trends in the watershed, except for the last three decades, when the effects of water use dominate the water-level trend.

which seems to cite this paper from C. Klein in 1985

Klein, C., 1985, Fluctuations of the level of the Dead Sea and climatic fluctuations in the country during historical times: International Asso-ciation of Hydrological Sciences, Symposium, Scientific basis for water resources management, September, 1985, Jerusalem, Israel, p. 197-224.

which is oft cited but appears not to be online. You may need a university affiliation or some sort of interlibrary loan.

(Here's a related paper PDF)

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You'll also notice in the report that they list their sources:

• Jordanian Ministry of Water and Irrigation

• Palestinian Water Authority

• Israeli Hydrological Service

• Israeli Meteorological Service

So you may have to start looking around and asking there.

Here's a link to translated hydrological data. I'd contact that org directly, unless you can read Hebrew. If you get the data in PDFs and put it into a machine readable format, I'm sure the rest of us would appreciate sharing it!