Old Weather Forum

Hi there,

Please help us test a possible new Zooniverse project - Cosmic Cataclysms.

What the researchers say: "The Universe produces a wide range of "transient" astronomical events: signals visible only for a moment, before fading away forever. Exploding stars, massive neutron stars, and black holes are predicted to power the most fleeting of these events. Discovering and understanding new fast transients can therefore elucidate the extreme physics behind the lives and deaths of these astronomical objects.

With lifetimes far less than a day, rapid transients are challenging to detect from the ground. We use data from NASA's TESS space telescope, in conjunction with a new detection pipeline (TESSELLATE), to look for changes in the sky that would otherwise be missed.

As a volunteer, you can contribute to Cosmic Cataclysms by examining the events detected by our pipeline and classifying them based on changes in their appearance and brightness. As these detections span from asteroids to supernovae, you'll get familiar with a wide range of objects, and you might be the first person to see something new and interesting flash in the night sky."

Try it out now at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/che ... cataclysms and give us your feedback via this form https://forms.gle/rG3km9ifVhYnHqos7 (which you can also reach by clicking the link on the project itself).

Your feedback is extremely important to us when deciding whether to approve or reject a project. To date you have helped launch over 450 Zooniverse projects!

Thanks for all your help!

Alisa & the Zooniverse Team

Hello, Zooniverse!

Let’s sail into climate past, charting historical rainfall in Southeast Asia.

The Monsoon Voyages aims to digitise and analyse historical rainfall data of SE Asia from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. This initiative addresses the critical need for long-term climate records to better understand past climate and inform future plans for agriculture, water supply, and flood management. At this instance, researchers are digitising mid-19th Century ship logbooks of British Royal Navy. Singapore and the Malacca Straits were an important segment of the global east-west trade route. Numerous ships passed through these seas, anchoring in many ports along the Malaysian and Indonesian coasts.

As ships’ often observed and recorded weather observations several times a day, even when in port, this creates a very important source of observations for places and times when land-based observations are not available. These ship logbooks not only contain climate history, but they are also first-hand witnesses of some of important historical events, for example, Second Anglo-Chinese War ("Opium war") of 1856 – 1860, Anglo-Japanese hostilities of 1863 – 1864, etc. These records offer rich perspective into monsoon behaviour, extreme weather events, and seasonal variability. By rescuing and digitising historical weather records, you are helping to ensure that valuable data is not lost to time. Read more at www.monsoonvoyages.org

Get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/p-t ... on-voyages



Happy classifying!

Alisa & the Zooniverse Team

I found contact info for a couple of their lead researchers, and I sent them an email about our work. We have already done 10 ships that sailed through Singapore. Their scans look pretty amateurish compared to the ones that NARA did.