Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
Southern Weather Discovery Phase II - The Week it Snowed Everywhere!
Data keying for this phase is completed - thanks to all our wonderful volunteers for their help!!!
This phase of Southern Weather Discovery has some extra support from a Microsoft AI for Earth grant. |
"The Week it Snowed Everywhere" dataset will help us improve understanding of extreme weather events within the context of long-term climate change. |
Research
Click below to watch the Southern Weather Discovery video and learn more about the project!
During the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of ships sailed across the Southern Ocean. These ship voyages included cargo transport, emigration from the Old World to the New World, hunting for resources (e.g. whales), as well as epic missions of exploration and scientific discovery.
Even in the face of constant hardship during tough conditions, these sailors and explorers recorded weather observations for navigation and scientific purposes. Our team has uncovered thousands of old ship log books and records from Antarctic explorations in archives around the world, which is a tremendous resource for climate science.
We need your help to get old Southern Ocean and Antarctic weather data off the pages in old log books and fed into a super-computer, which will bring them to life in a daily weather animation for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.
With your help, we can use that animation to better understand past weather patterns and evaluate historic climate trends from a region we know little about.
Are you ready to help us find data treasure from the waters surrounding Antarctica?
Let's go!!
What does a logbook page actually look like?
The image above is an example of what one of the ship logbook pages looks like - this one is from the MS Durham, on a journey from Wellington, New Zealand to London, United Kingdom, via Cape Horn in 1938.
There is a huge amount of weather information on each page. Most days, four observations were made for many different climate variables. Our research has prioritised certain climate variables for recovery at this stage: sea level pressure, temperature, and sea ice observations. We also need to record the location of the observations (latitude and longitude) so we can reconstruct the weather of that point in time and space.
We have made rescuing the weather observations much easier by clipping each logbook page into smaller images, which you can see when you have a go at keying the data yourself. That way it's much easier to keep track of the numbers you're entering, rather than getting lost among a sea of numbers!