See Register here to join our projects
Description and History
See The Origins and Evolution of Old Weather.
Icebound: The climate-change secrets of 19th century ship's logs By Andrew R.C. Marshall
An eccentric group of citizen-scientists called Old Weather has transcribed millions of observations from long-forgotten logbooks of ships,
many from the great era of Arctic exploration. As the polar regions grow ever warmer, the volunteers have amassed a rich repository of climate data in a 21st century rescue mission.
The role of ECMWF and the C3S in historical data rescue
Long records of weather conditions stretching back to the beginning of the 20th century and earlier are vital to understand climate variability and change. Such data provide a baseline of past, historical climate and underpin efforts to monitor, manage and adapt to the changing risks from climate extremes and hazardous weather.
...
Citizen science also has a role to play. For example, as part of the OldWeather initiative, volunteers explore, mark, and transcribe ships' logs from the 19th and early 20th centuries (Figure 4). These tasks are very difficult to automate, due to the diversity of reports and idiosyncratic handwriting that only human beings can read and understand effectively.
Old Weather: Arctic was our first phase. That covered the North Atlantic and the North Pacific but concentrated on Alaska.
The current phase is Old Weather: Federal ships. This includes Navy and Coast Guard (originally called Revenue-Marine and then Revenue Cutter Service) ships from roughly 1867 to 1946. Our main interest is tropical oceans, but we cover other areas as well.
Getting Started
Here are the key references:
- For information on LibreOffice and the spreadsheets, see:
Installing and Setting Up
Using the Spreadsheet
Hints, Tips and Tricks - Transcribing Guide
- Current ships
- Using the Tracker
- Uploading Your Data
and some ship-specific examples (e.g., Burton Island -- Examples).
We have a wonderful group of friendly, knowledgeable people and lots of helpful reference material.
We encourage you to ask questions or post comments in Ask Questions Here.
You can also send a PM (Private Message) to Randi and/or Michael.
Old Weather Blogs
- HMS Africa in action against Orthomyxoviridae
- The new Jeannette opera house
- Brightening the world
- A history of the world in 1,399,120,833 observations
- All will be assimilated
- The USS Jeannette: Arctic explorer and Space Weather pioneer
- Better bad weather with oldWeather
- Free at last
- Editing the weather observations
- The Sitka Hurricane of 1880
- Getting oldWeather data ship-shape for science
