BSc student from UK - Meteorological influences on the Yankee Whaling Industry

[AvastMH]

I'm a BSc Marine Zoology student from Newquay, Cornwall. For my honours project I've decided to focus on Yankee Whaling from 1790-1920 correlating that with historical Arctic Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation and El Nino data and historical events to establish whether meteorologic forces impacted on the industry. I want to evaluate whether CPUE was affected historically by natural phenomena (taking into account some major events like the civil war, which impacted whaling catch data). I've been trawling through the datasets from whalinghistory.org and have a couple of historic NAO and ENSO datasets to look at, yet to find any AO datasets. The project is in it's infancy and I happened upon your site while researching the lit review. Interesting to see that the old logbooks can teach us alot about historic weather patterns and help us to predict future climate change. If anyone out thee has anything useful for my project please get in touch - equally I will submit my findings to you if it will help you in any way xx

[AvastMH]

Hi Orcanick - Welcome to you and your first post on the Forum!

Kevin Wood should be getting back to you in a couple of days. But if anyone else in OW has goodies to share with Orcanick that would be good too