Old Weather

Last updated
Old Weather
Oldweather.jpg
Type of site
Volunteer Scientific Project
Available inEnglish
Owner Zooniverse
Created byZooniverse
URL www.oldweather.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationYes
Launched12 October 2010 (2010-10-12)
Current statusactive

Old Weather is an online weather data project that currently invites members of the public to assist in digitising weather observations recorded in US log books dating from the mid-19th century onwards. It is an example of citizen science that enlists members of the public to help in scientific research. It contributes to the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth initiative. [1] Data collected by Old Weather has been used by at least five different climate reanalysis projects, including HURDAT, SODA and ECMWF. [2] In February 2013, the project was awarded the Royal Meteorological Society IBM Award for Meteorological Innovation that Matters. [3]

Contents

Origins

Old Weather is a Zooniverse project and is a collaboration between researchers at many institutions, including the University of Oxford, Oxford Martin School, ACRE (International Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth), Naval-History.Net of Penarth, Jisc which encourages UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, the National Maritime Museum at Maritime Greenwich, London, and the UK National Archives, Kew, London.

Importance of volunteers

In the past, computer programs have proved unable to read handwriting reliably and the task is much better performed by humans and the results transferred to a digital form. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

In the site's tutorial, would-be volunteers are shown how to digitise a weather record. Further instructions on how to transcribe the logs are available on the associated Old Weather forum. It is intended that the pages of the logs are digitised by at least three people. The results will be used to make climate model projections and an improved database of weather extremes.

The Old Weather project is still ongoing and new volunteers are still needed and welcomed. [11]

USRC, USCG and USS log books

Currently, the log books of two US vessels are available, each of which have been scanned page by page, and the logs of another 21 vessels have been completed. More log books will be added at intervals. The transcriber notes the following from the log books: date, location (or voyage) and weather records, usually consisting of wind direction and strength, weather conditions, cloud type and/or amount of clear sky, barometric pressure and temperature readings. Other log entries, such as refueling figures and sightings of sea-ice, ships, people, landmarks or animals may also be recorded, as well as interesting events.

Progress

Phases I & II

Phase I was launched in October 2010 [12] [13] and all the available Royal Navy logs from that phase and from Phase II have now been completed. By July 23, 2012, officially, 16,400 volunteers had transcribed the weather data from 1,090,745 pages [14] of the log books of 302 ships. These phases of the project have generated 1.6 million weather observations. [15]

Phase III

Phase III, consisting of logs from US ships voyaging in the Arctic and worldwide from the mid-1800s onward, was launched in October 2012. [16] [17] Phase III was completed 06 August 2018.

Old Weather WWII

This project was to collect data from the ship logs from 19 US Navy ships in World War II. [18] The project was completed in 2019.

US Federal ships

Currently, the scope of the project is being extended to include all the oceans including Arctic voyages and expeditions. [19] Satellite imagery of this region goes back only to the 1950s, but it was explored for 100 years before that (for example the Franklin Expedition). When Phase III ended, a new method was required for data input. The volunteer transcribers developed their own method using LibreCalc spreadsheets with the log pages imported as a background. This method better suited the needs of the transcribers. The data from the log pages are transcribed in the spreadsheet and the results for each log page are saved in an XML file. These files are uploaded to a Google drive for processing. This method for data extraction was approved by the science team consisting of Philip Brohan, Kevin Wood and Gil Compo. The results were found to be so accurate, that only one transcription is required for each log page. [20] This portion of the Old Weather project is still ongoing with and emphasis of years between 1860 and 1890. To learn how to participate in this project, visit the Old Weather forum.

Whaling Logs

This project focuses on the logbooks of whaling ships that sailed Arctic seas from 1849 to 1912. Volunteer transcribers create spreadsheets of information on sea ice and weather provided in the logbooks for scientists to use in climate studies. [21] The logbooks are handwritten and non-standardized so volunteers are encouraged to work communally on transcription work. [22]

Following the death of project founder Kevin Wood, the Whaling Logs section is currently seeking a new institution or platform to accept any future data. [23] The project is not accepting new volunteers until the data has a new home.

Naval History

Old Weather volunteers are transcribing historical data from the ships' logs from US Navy, Revenue Cutter Service/Coast Guard and Coast & Geodetic Survey ships operating mostly in the Arctic and in the Pacific Ocean in the 19th and 20th Centuries.The historical transcriptions are published here, before and after they are edited by Naval-History volunteers. For more details, or to find out how to join in, visit the Old Weather Forum.

Results

Initial results of Phase I will be published after data collection is complete and conclusions can be made.

Indeed, the readings are still being assessed at a very broad level. But the distribution of temperature by latitude and wind force by latitude have been plotted for 120,000 results for which three readings have been taken. [24]

Large numbers of online volunteers at Old Weather from 2010 to 2012 transcribed historical weather data and naval events from the logbooks of the 314 Royal Navy ships of the World War 1 era. 350,000 pages were transcribed and include logs from ships present at the Battle of the Falklands, at Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, East Africa, and the China Station. Nearly all of the transcriptions have been edited and published. Brief details of all the ships can be found here.

The Old Weather U. S. Federal Ships project is still ongoing. As of the end of 2023, 248 ship/years had been processed, with over 7.6 million weather observations digitized. [25] Data from up to 20 different weather elements have been recorded. [26] Data from the project was analyzed by NOAA to reconstruct what had long been described as a hurricane that hit Sitka in Alaska in 1880. The reanalysis showed that it wasn’t a hurricane, but part of a much larger storm system known as an extra-tropical cyclone. [27]

Security and political considerations

Because climate change [28] is a very political issue, interested parties could try to corrupt the data by, say, entering temperature figures that are too high or too low. Because three sets of records for each data point will be entered, any set from a digitiser showing a marked deviation from the other records should be easily checkable and eliminated. Large-scale fraud is unlikely because the data is entered one log page at a time, and so is immune to a spam type of attack. Collaborative projects such as Linux and Wikipedia have for the most part been able to rely on the transparent honesty of those taking part.[ citation needed ]

Accidental errors

Accidental errors, such as reading '4's for '7's are possible, but often context will sort this out. A temperature of 40 °F is unlikely to be correct for a latitude in the tropics and may safely be assumed to be 70 °F. [29]

See also

Zooniverse projects:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weather station</span> Facility for atmospheric research and prediction

A weather station is a facility, either on land or sea, with instruments and equipment for measuring atmospheric conditions to provide information for weather forecasts and to study the weather and climate. The measurements taken include temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, and precipitation amounts. Wind measurements are taken with as few other obstructions as possible, while temperature and humidity measurements are kept free from direct solar radiation, or insolation. Manual observations are taken at least once daily, while automated measurements are taken at least once an hour. Weather conditions out at sea are taken by ships and buoys, which measure slightly different meteorological quantities such as sea surface temperature (SST), wave height, and wave period. Drifting weather buoys outnumber their moored versions by a significant amount.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eureka, Nunavut</span> Research station in Canada

Eureka is a small research base on Fosheim Peninsula, Ellesmere Island, Qikiqtaaluk Region, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. It is located on the north side of Slidre Fiord, which enters Eureka Sound farther west. It is the third-northernmost permanent research community in the world. The only two farther north are Alert, which is also on Ellesmere Island, and Nord, in Greenland. Eureka has the lowest average annual temperature and the lowest amount of precipitation of any weather station in Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prince Patrick Island</span> Uninhabited island in the Northwest Territories, Canada

A member of the Arctic Archipelago, Prince Patrick Island is the westernmost of the Queen Elizabeth Islands in the Northwest Territories of Canada, lying northwest of Melville Island. The area of Prince Patrick Island is 15,848 km2 (6,119 sq mi), making it the 55th largest island in the world and Canada's 14th largest island. It has historically been icebound all year, making it one of the least accessible parts of Canada. Located at the entrance of the M'Clure Strait, Prince Patrick Island is uninhabited.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arctic oscillation</span> Climatic cycle over Earths North Pole

The Arctic oscillation (AO) or Northern Annular Mode/Northern Hemisphere Annular Mode (NAM) is a weather phenomenon at the Arctic pole north of 20 degrees latitude. It is an important mode of climate variability for the Northern Hemisphere. The southern hemisphere analogue is called the Antarctic oscillation or Southern Annular Mode (SAM). The index varies over time with no particular periodicity, and is characterized by non-seasonal sea-level pressure anomalies of one sign in the Arctic, balanced by anomalies of opposite sign centered at about 37–45° N.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logbook</span> Book for recording activities

A logbook is a record used to record states, events, or conditions applicable to complex machines or the personnel who operate them. Logbooks are commonly associated with the operation of aircraft, nuclear plants, particle accelerators, and ships.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logbook (nautical)</span> Log of the daily activities of a ship

A logbook is a record of important events in the management, operation, and navigation of a ship. It is essential to traditional navigation, and must be filled in at least daily.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citizen science</span> Amateur scientific research

Citizen science is research conducted with participation from the general public, or amateur/nonprofessional researchers or participants for science, social science and many other disciplines. There are variations in the exact definition of citizen science, with different individuals and organizations having their own specific interpretations of what citizen science encompasses. Citizen science is used in a wide range of areas of study including ecology, biology and conservation, health and medical research, astronomy, media and communications and information science.

The Climatological database for the world's oceans (CLIWOC) was a research project to convert ships' logbooks into a computerised database. It was funded by the European Union, and the bulk of the work was done between 2001 and 2003. The database draws on British, Dutch, French and Spanish ships' logbook records for the immediate pre-instrumental period, 1750 to 1850.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgy Brusilov</span> Russian naval officer

Georgy Lvovich Brusilov was a Russian naval officer of the Imperial Russian Navy and an Arctic explorer. His father, Lev Brusilov, was also a naval officer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Watts (blogger)</span> American blogger (born 1958)

Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change. A former television meteorologist and current radio meteorologist, he is also founder of the Surface Stations project, a volunteer initiative to document the condition of U.S. weather stations. The Heartland Institute helped fund some of Watts' projects, including publishing a report on the Surface Stations project, and invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FreeBMD</span> UK vital records website

FreeBMD is a website which coordinates and provides free transcriptions of the indexes to births, marriages and deaths (BMD) held by the General Register Office for England and Wales (GRO). It also provides a free search function and online access to images of the pages of the BMD indexes. The website was founded in 1998. FreeBMD was registered as a UK charity in 2003, with the organisation changing its name to Free UK Genealogy in 2014 to reflect the broadening of its scope.

<i>Cadmus</i>-class sloop

The Cadmus class was a six-ship class of 10-gun screw steel sloops built at Sheerness Dockyard for the Royal Navy between 1900 and 1903. This was the last class of the Victorian Navy's multitude of sloops, gunvessels and gunboats to be constructed, and they followed the traditional pattern for 'colonial' small warships, with a full rig of sails. After them, the "Fisher Reforms" of the Navy ended the construction and deployment of this type of vessel. All of the class survived until the 1920s, remaining on colonial stations during World War I.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zooniverse</span> Citizen science platform

Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The organization grew from the original Galaxy Zoo project and now hosts dozens of projects which allow volunteers to participate in crowdsourced scientific research. It has headquarters at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium. Unlike many early internet-based citizen science projects which used spare computer processing power to analyse data, known as volunteer computing, Zooniverse projects require the active participation of human volunteers to complete research tasks. Projects have been drawn from disciplines including astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Milky Way Project</span>

The Milky Way Project is a Zooniverse project whose main goal is to identify stellar-wind bubbles in the Milky Way Galaxy. Users classify sets of infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Scientists believe bubbles in these images are the result of young, massive stars whose light causes shocks in interstellar gas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transcribe Bentham</span> Crowdsourced manuscript transcription project

Transcribe Bentham is a crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, run by University College London's Bentham Project, in partnership with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Learning and Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre, and the online community. Transcribe Bentham was launched under a twelve-month Arts and Humanities Research Council grant.

The Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth, ACRE, is an international science project, began in 2008, that recovers historical weather observations to reconstruct past global and local weather patterns and so support meteorological reanalysis. The project aims to collect weather data from the past 250 years by linking international meteorological organisations to support data recovery projects and the imaging and digitisation of historical meteorological observations made at, for example, inland stations, lighthouses, or by ships at sea or in ports. The project aims to create historical datasets that are spatially and temporally complete, so as to be of value at a local, or regional level, as well as on a global scale. ACRE aims to recover millions of historic weather observations. This data will be deposited into two databases,

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asteroid Zoo</span>

Asteroid Zoo was a citizen science project run by the Zooniverse and Planetary Resources, to use volunteer classifications to find unknown asteroids using old Catalina Sky Survey data. The main goals of the project were to search for undiscovered asteroids in order to protect the planet by locating potentially harmful Near-earth asteroids, locate targets for future asteroid mining, study the solar system, and study the potential uses and advantages of crowdsourcing of astronomical data analysis. The project was created along with the ARKYD project through Kickstarter in 2014 and was funded with around 1.5 million dollars raised.

Caroline C. Ummenhofer is a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she studies extreme weather events with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean. Ummenhofer makes an effort to connect her discoveries about predicting extreme weather events and precipitation to helping the nations affected.

References

  1. ↑ "International Projects, Sources & Repositories Linked to ACRE" . Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  2. ↑ Philip Brohan (1 March 2013). "People using our results". Oldweather.org. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  3. ↑ "2012 Award Winners". Royal Meteorological Society. 2013. Retrieved 20 February 2013.
  4. ↑ "Kweken Wiet | Wiet Kweken". UK 2 (in Dutch). Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  5. ↑ "READ Project – Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents". read.transkribus.eu. Archived from the original on 2017-09-07.
  6. ↑ "TS demo | books view". Archived from the original on 2018-09-30. Retrieved 2018-09-30.
  7. ↑ "Himanis - Chancery Indexing and Search".
  8. ↑ "TSO/BNE/PROLOPE/PRHLT - Indexing and Search".
  9. ↑ "PRHLT Indexing and Search".
  10. ↑ "Handwritting Text Keyword Indexing and Search, PRHLT Demonstrators". Archived from the original on 2018-09-30. Retrieved 2018-09-30.
  11. ↑ "Register here to join our projects - Old Weather Forum".
  12. ↑ Rachel Saslow (2010-10-18). "British scientists seek help extracting weather data from WW1 naval records". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
  13. ↑ BBC staff (2010-10-13). "WW1 ships to chart past climate". BBC News. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
  14. ↑ Philip Brohan (2012). "Theres a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one". Oldweather.org. Retrieved 5 November 2012.
  15. ↑ Philip Brohan (2012). "One million six hundred thousand new observations". Oldweather.org. Retrieved 5 November 2012.
  16. ↑ Simpson, Ian (2012). "US Looks to Old Arctic Ship Logs for Climate Change Clues". ScientificAmerican.com. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
  17. ↑ Justin Gillis (2012-10-24). "Retrieving the weather of the past". New York Times. Retrieved 5 November 2012.
  18. ↑ "Zooniverse".
  19. ↑ Heikes, Randi (2020). "Introduction".
  20. ↑ Purves, Michael (2022). "The Origin and Evolution of Old Weather".
  21. ↑ "Old Weather - Shipping Office". www.oldweather.org. Retrieved 2024-03-06.
  22. ↑ "START HERE. General outline, the project and how to help - Old Weather Forum". www.oldweatherforum.org. Retrieved 2024-03-06.
  23. ↑ "Changes to OW Whaling - Old Weather Forum". www.oldweatherforum.org. Retrieved 2024-03-06.
  24. ↑ Philip Brohan (3 February 2011). "Stanley to Archangel, and all points in between". Oldweather.org. Retrieved 15 February 2011.
  25. ↑ "Old Weather is alive and well - Old Weather Forum".
  26. ↑ "Old Weather is alive and well - Old Weather Forum".
  27. ↑ Marshall, Andrew R.C. (December 11, 2019). "Icebound: the climate secrets of 19th century ships' logs". Reuters.
  28. ↑ "Climate change". Met Office. 2008-11-19. Archived from the original on 2010-11-27. Retrieved 2010-11-11.
  29. ↑ The Zooniverse (2010-10-27). "First fruits:Weather records from HMS Acacia". Oldweather.org. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
Notes
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.