AHOY!: HMS Foxglove was a British minesweeper that patrolled the South Pacific from 1915 to 1945.
Image: Illustration by Mark Weaver. National Archives, England (ship and logbook)
In Brief
- Citizen science projects marshal lay volunteers to help researchers carry out labor-intensive studies. Volunteers might report species sightings, assist in categorizing images or analyze data.
- The Old Weather project is a collaboration among scientists, including British paleoclimatologist Philip Brohan, and thousands of nonexperts who are helping him plug holes in the planet’s climate record.
- Brohan’s volunteers comb through the digitized logbooks of World War I–era ships, which would be difficult for a computer to read, and enter weather data into the project’s Web site.
- NOAA will add the collected information to its records in the U.S. A task that might have taken one professional transcriber 28 years took volunteers just six months to complete.
Kathy Wendolkowski used to make candy in her spare time. for the past year and a half, this mother of three from Gaithersburg, Md., has been spending two to three hours a day on the Web site Old Weather (www.oldweather.org). There she transcribes temperature, pressure and wind-speed records from the logbooks of HMS Foxglove, a British minesweeper that patrolled the South Pacific in the years following World War I. It was a friend, a naval historian, who told her about the site soon after its launch in October 2010, Wendolkowski says. She quickly got hooked—not by the actual weather data but by the narrative of the Foxglove’s journey and crew, a story that played out alongside the thermometer readings in each day’s logbook entries.
Old Weather is one of a handful of online endeavors that marshal volunteers to help researchers, relying on thousands of “citizen scientists” to comb through data that would otherwise be impractical to mine, explains British paleoclimatologist Philip Brohan, the project’s lead scientist. Brohan, who estimates that it would take a professional transcriber 28 years to complete the work Old Weather volunteers finished in the project’s first six months, says that those transcriptions are invaluable to researchers like him, who scrutinize data from the past to help predict what we will see in the future. “Every time there’s a big storm, people ask, ‘Would this have happened in the absence of human impact on the climate?’” Brohan says. “Is it new or unusual, or is it the sort of thing that’s happened before? If we want to answer that question, we need to know how the weather has varied in the past.”
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3 Comments
Add CommentObviously, major typo in URL in article header -- "oldweather.com" [sic] has nothing to do with weather...!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat URL should be http://www.oldweather.org/. oldweather.com is a parking domain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis should alarm Conservative Republicans, as the obvious results of this endeavor will be confirmation of rampant AGW.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, I'm not sure that filling "holes" in the climate record is a wise thing to do, as the very activity might indicate to some that it's not all said and done regarding human-caused climate change.
Faith should not require proof.