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Plotting old weather logs

A new online science project is using crowdsourcing to create an historic climate record to allow meteorologists to better understand past weather and make predictions about the potential impact of climate change.

The Old Weather Project, which launched at the end of October, is using citizen scientists to process weather observations from 238 British naval ships, ranging from gunboats to destroyers to survey vessels, involved in the First World War.

A smaller Swiss Project called Data.Rescue@Home is using citizen journalists to interpret data from German weather balloons during the Second World War and from a meteorological station in the Solomon Islands that operated during the first half of the 20th century.

Philip Brohan, climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, said: 'The virtue of the navy is that they sent ships all over the world. We built models but we want to know if they're any good. We need big databases and long records.'

The climate scientists approached Zooniverse, a network of interactive citizen science projects investigating aspects of astronomy. The volunteers do not need to have knowledge of either climate or sailing, but must be able to decipher the handwriting of early 20th century sailors.

On selecting a ship, the volunteer receives a scanned image of an actual page from its logbook. Any weather data, such as wind speed and direction or air and water temperatures, and additional data, such as mentions of battle debris or volcanoes, must be logged into a colour coded pop up box.

The information will be processed by scientists at Hadley Centre and entered into international historical weather databases, where they can be accessed and used b y other researchers.

To date, volunteers have digitised 193,866 pages from the log books of 28 ships, representing 24 per cent of the logs. The scientists estimate it would take one person 28 years to complete the research, but have set aside six months to complete The Old Weather Project.

If The Old Weather Project proves successful, other collections of log books, including those of the East India Trading Company which sailed between England and India and China during the 18th and 19th centuries, may be digitised.

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