Results
The data you digitise will contribute to existing global research projects. For some examples of how and where the data has been used, see articles in popular press and selected peer-reviewed articles below.
Articles in the popular press
Old weather “time machine” opens a treasure trove for researchers: One key to the past is crowd-sourcing data recovery
NOAA Research News, 2019
It’s been the stuff of science fiction for generations: a time machine that would allow researchers to reach back into yesteryear and ask new questions about long-ago events. This month, a NOAA-funded research team published an update to a weather “time machine” they’ve been developing since 2011. This third version of the 20th Century Reanalysis Project, or 20CRv3 for short, is a dauntingly complex, high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was for every day back to 1836.
https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2560/Old-weather-time-machine-opens-a-treasure-trove-for-researchers
ICEBOUND: The climate-change secrets of 19th century ship's logs
Reuters, 2019
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.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/climate-change-ice-shiplogs/
Shipping logs show how quickly Arctic sea ice is melting
The Economist, 2019
CLIMATE CHANGE is affecting all parts of the globe. But no place is feeling the heat quite like the Arctic. Although average global temperatures have risen by about 1°C since pre-industrial times, warming in the Arctic is happening two to three times as fast. The area of ice covering the Arctic ocean is at a record low, according to America’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre. Over the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/08/13/shipping-logs-show-how-quickly-arctic-sea-ice-is-melting
Selected peer-reviewed papers
Observed emergence of the climate change signal: From the familiar to the unknown
Ed Hawkins, et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 2020
Changes in climate are translated into impacts on society not just though the amount of change, but how this change compares to the variations in climate that society is used to. Here we demonstrate that significant changes, when compared to the size of past variations, are present in both temperature and rainfall observations over many parts of the world.
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL086259
Towards a more reliable historical reanalysis: Improvements for version 3 of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis system
Laura Slivinski, et al., Q J R Meteorol Soc., 2019
Historical reanalyses that span more than a century are needed for a wide range of studies, from understanding large‐scale climate trends to diagnosing the impacts of individual historical extreme weather events. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) Project is an effort to fill this need.
https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3598
The International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set – Meeting Users Needs and Future Priorities
Eric Freeman, et al. Frontiers in Marine Science, 2019
The International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) is a collection and archive of in situ marine observations, which has been developed over several decades as an international project. ICOADS contains observations from many different observing systems encompassing the evolution of measurement technology since the 18th century.
https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmars.2019.00435