Weather Rescue At Sea

Project Background

Weather has always fascinated humans. Any deviation from the ‘normal’ weather could make a difference between plentiful or famine years, for example. Observing and following the weather through the changing seasons was crucial to survival in the pre-industrial era. It was more so for those who spent long periods of time on-board ships travelling across the globe. In the age of sail, knowledge of winds and currents was crucial to reach their destinations safely and on-time.

Out of practical necessity, gradually, maritime nations developed several weather observing instruments and procedures to record the weather encountered on long sea journeys. And, in 1854, a maritime conference of sea-faring nations tried to codify observation taking and record keeping to standardise and share observations among themselves. That process amassed an enormous number of 'standard' logbooks containing detailed sub-daily weather observations at sea from around the globe, but very few of these logbooks have been transcribed into digital format for modern-day scientists to analyse and understand.

Figure 1. The average number of observations recorded per month for each year in the ICOADS dataset, the sizes of data points are proportional to the percent of globe covered by observations that year.

There is a scientific interest in understanding the climate of the early industrial era against which our present climate could be measured. Invaluable data from many hundreds of thousands of such journeys can be used to inform and to estimate the changes that occurred over many decades. Data rescue (transcribing hand-written observations into computer readable digital format) of historical logbooks has been taking place for decades, but to manually transcribe an almost inexhaustible number of logbooks by individual researchers, would take thousands of human lifetimes.

As a result, large gaps have remained in our knowledge of the climate, both in space and time. The 19th Century has fewer observations available than the 20th Century (Fig. 1) in the world's largest observation meteorological dataset, ICOADS version 3 (International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set, Freeman et al. 2011). On closer inspection, the average number of monthly observations and percent of global coverage in the 1860s and 1870s is relatively poor compared to other decades after 1850.

Project Objectives

With this context, the Weather Rescue At Sea project will use the citizen science-based zooniverse platform to recover some of these observations and make them usable, with a focus on ships travelling through the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific ocean basins in the 1860s and 1870s. Filling in the gaps in our knowledge will remove ambiguity in how the climate varied historically in many regions where observations are currently poor or non-existent.

Logbooks archived at the UKHO (UK Hydrographic Office in Taunton) are best suited to produce data in the targeted time period with global coverage. The UK has a rich sea-faring tradition which goes back to the age of HMS Discovery, and has historical trading links with other nations across the globe.

The data generated through this project will help fill many crucial gaps in the large climate datasets (e.g. ICOADS) which will be used to generate new estimates of the industrial and pre-industrial era baseline climate. But more generally, this data and data from other historical sources are used to improve the models and reanalysis systems used for climate and weather research.

The Weather Rescue At Sea project is the data rescue component of GloSAT, a project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council to develop and analyse an extended and consistent global surface temperature climate record back to the 1780s, based on air temperature observations recorded across land, ocean and ice. The new GloSAT temperature record will give a longer and more consistent picture of global surface air temperature change, and its analysis will improve our understanding of climate change since the late 18th century.