Old Weather Forum

DJ_59 wrote: If you find articles about the Old Weather project, post links here!

Link to archive of this discussion from the old forum

Just out in the WMO Bulletin - https://public.wmo.int/en/resources/bul ... ange-ocean

You'll see a call-out to the good work of Old Weather and the gang of re-navigators.

I guess we won't b e running out of things to do:

The enormous potential for data rescue is illustrated by the size of the U.S. collection that remains largely unutilized. Beginning in 1847, the logbooks of the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard/Revenue Cutter Service and Coast Survey contain 24-hourly weather records per day, and include 7–10 variables per hour, although not all variables were uniformly acquired in fact until after the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865). There are roughly 22 700 logbooks in the National Archives that date between 1801 and 1941. Until 1915, most volumes contain about one year’s worth of observations, and then from 1915–1941 logbooks were generally bound in monthly volumes. Conservatively estimating that only half of these logbooks contain all 24-hourly observations that would amount to 75 500 000 weather records to be recovered. There are undoubtedly tens of millions more unrecovered weather records from the World War II era and after.

Thanks Kevin.
It's good to see Old Weather's efforts mentioned.
So many weather records yet to be digitized!

Bliss! Endless work - that's always good news

Monday, 14 December 1733. At the marker it says that there was wind from the west with a strength of bramsejls kuling (i.e. topgallant sail).

Seems to me like they are showing the wrong page
Aside from the lack of a marker, this page starts on Tuesday the 15'th.

Also Google seems to think the language is Danish rather than German.
Is it from Deutscher Wetterdienst or Danish Meteorological Institute/National Archives of Denmark?

As a German speaker and resident, I would say Danish - the days of the week are definitely not German, nor are the few other words I can make out.

April is NOAA Citizen Science month, and Old Weather - WWII will be featured soon.
https://www.noaa.gov/education/stories/ ... ect-of-day

Randi wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 7:21 pm

Same from me

Very fascinating! The two articles about searching for the "Bear" and the article from the WMO are very worthwhile reading.

Michael, Is that one of your maps with the yellow lines?

No. that map was done by someone on Kevin's team, but I forget by whom. I supplied the locations.

We have been contacted by a German reporter!

He is going to write a one hour documentary about OW for a radio station, and Stern (one of Germany's biggest magazines) asked him to write about the project!!!

If you are willing to be interviewed, contact Michael!

This is our chance to get some new volunteers!!!

Once upon a time, Dr Victoria Van Hyning (Assistant Professor of Library Innovation, Director, Center for Archival Futures (CAFe), University of Maryland, College of Information Studies (iSchool)) was sitting beside Philip Brohan at a conference. Philip made an off-hand remark about the OW volunteers developing their own system for data entry. She was curious and contacted us about our system for data entry. She and her PHD student, Britney Bibeaul, set out to write an academic paper about how we use LibreCalc to transcribe text data from old Navy and Coast Guard log books. They are still working on the paper but, in the meantime, they submitted a poster to the Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology held in London, England at the end of October. The theme of this meeting was:

Making a Difference: Translating Information Research into Practice, Policy, and Action

Here are two photos from the conference and a copy of the almost finalized version of the poster:

Nice one.