Monsoon voyages

Accurately predicting rainfall is crucial to our society. We depend on rain for drinking water, growing crops, and for our factories to function, particularly in regions like Southeast Asia. Prolonged dry spells in places like Singapore could lead to water shortages. Yet, too much rain causes disruption, damages crops and overwhelms our infrastructure. Researchers predict that extreme rainfall and drought events will increase in severity and frequency, but because we do not have much rainfall data from before the 1960s, our predictions have high levels of uncertainty.

This project seeks to recover important historical rainfall data from the logbooks of ships that travelled through the straits of Southeast Asia. As they moved through the region, these vessels made weather observations that are now stored in archives across the UK. We bring together over 200 of these logbooks, containing 34,748 days of observations.

We need your help in digitising this weather information

The weather data you digitise will help fill important gaps in large global climate datasets like ICOADS, giving us a clearer picture of what our climate was like in industrial and pre-industrial times. Having better estimates of these historical climates will result in more accurate predictions about future extreme weather events as we transition towards a more climate-resilient society.

To begin, click on the "Classify" tab and try your hand with one of our logbook pages!

Funding and Background

The OUR Project project is the data rescue component of Water Security, a project funded by Singapore’s Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund (AcRF) TIER 2 (T2EP40123-0021), to develop and analyse an extended and consistent regional rainfall record back to the 1900s, based on instrumental and descriptive rainfall observations. This new rainfall record will give a longer and more consistent picture of regional rainfall patterns, and its analysis will improve our understanding of change in rainfall since the 20th century.

Our logbooks are all from the UK Hydrographic Office archive. They are from Royal Navy vessels that sailed from Britain to Asia, crossing the Bay of Bengal, Andaman and China Seas, calling in at ports along the Malacca Strait and Riau Archipelago in the 19th and 20th centuries. The purpose of these voyages could vary but their roles included surveying, patrolling coastal and oceanic waters or engaging in active warfare. We would like to thank Clive Wilkinson and the UK Hydrographic Office, Taunton, for their assistance in making these logbooks available for this project.

In the future, we will also recover weather data from other historical sources, including agricultural and weather journals from the region.

*Cover page background image: Two ships being repaired at Victoria Dock, Singapore in 1890s. Source: NLB Singapore (All rights reserved. Lee Kip Lin and National Library Board, Singapore 2009)