Old Weather

Old Weather
Name	Old Weather
Launched	2010
Founder	Zooniverse
Partners	National Maritime Museum, Royal Navy, Met Office
Focus	Historical weather data transcription, climate reconstruction, naval history
Methods	Citizen science, crowdsourcing, digitization, image transcription
Status	Active

Old Weather Old Weather is a citizen science project that engages volunteers to transcribe historical ship logbooks and other archival documents to recover meteorological and navigational observations for use in climate science, naval history, and polar research. The initiative connects archives, museums, and research institutions to convert handwritten records into machine-readable datasets supporting paleoclimatology, oceanography, and historical scholarship. Coordinated collaborations have linked maritime museums, meteorological services, and computational research centers to repurpose primary sources for modern scientific analysis.

Background and origins

The project originated from collaborations among the Zooniverse, the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), the Met Office, and academic researchers in response to gaps identified by World Meteorological Organization datasets and initiatives such as the International Geophysical Year. Influenced by earlier digitization efforts at the National Archives (United Kingdom), the project drew on methods developed in crowdsourcing projects like Galaxy Zoo and archival transcription programs at institutions including the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress. Initial pilots involved volunteers working on Royal Navy logbooks from the Age of Sail and early steam eras, leveraging collections from the Scott Polar Research Institute and the Royal Meteorological Society archives.

Project goals and methodology

The stated goals include improving historical climate reconstructions used by groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and supporting maritime historians studying voyages like those of James Cook and Robert Falcon Scott. Methodologically, the project combines human transcription with quality control frameworks informed by practices at the British Library and statistical validation similar to techniques used in data assimilation at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Volunteers transcribe fields such as wind, pressure, temperature, sea state, and positional fixes to create datasets compatible with repositories like the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set and the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.

Data sources and transcription processes

Primary sources comprise logbooks, ship journals, and expedition diaries from collections held by the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), the National Archives (UK), the National Archives and Records Administration, the Old Royal Naval College, and polar collections such as those of the British Antarctic Survey. Transcription processes deploy crowd consensus and expert adjudication similar to workflows used by the Transcribe Bentham project and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The project has processed material from famous voyages including records related to HMS Endeavour, HMS Beagle, and polar expeditions tied to the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Metadata standards align with schemas used by the Digital Public Library of America and the Europeana portal.

Scientific and historical contributions

Outputs have supported reanalysis projects such as 20th Century Reanalysis Project and contributions to datasets informing reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and studies published in journals like Nature and Geophysical Research Letters. Historical findings have aided scholars of naval operations examining campaigns like the Battle of Jutland and merchant shipping patterns in the First World War. The digitized records have informed paleoclimate reconstructions used alongside proxy records from the Greenland ice cores, Antarctic ice core studies, and tree-ring chronologies assembled by projects at institutions like the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

Technology and tools

The platform uses web-based transcription interfaces developed within the Zooniverse framework, integrating image serving systems akin to those at the Biodiversity Heritage Library and text handling comparable to the Transcribe Bentham environment. Data curation and ingestion employ formats compatible with CSV delivery to modeling centers and APIs used by the Copernicus Programme research infrastructure. Optical character recognition models and machine-learning classifiers have been trained with volunteer-produced datasets, echoing approaches from projects at Google Research and university groups at University College London.

Community and volunteer involvement

Volunteer engagement strategies mirror outreach from large participatory science initiatives such as Citizen Science Association programs and community curation efforts at the Smithsonian Transcription Center. Contributors have ranged from amateur historians to professional climatologists affiliated with institutions like the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and University of Reading. The project has organized campaigns tied to anniversaries of voyages by figures like Ernest Shackleton and coordinated with veteran and maritime heritage organizations including the Royal Navy associations.

Criticisms and limitations

Critiques have focused on potential transcription bias, uneven geographic and temporal coverage reflecting archive holdings at institutions such as the National Maritime Museum and the National Archives (UK), and challenges matching historical instrumentation to modern standards—a concern also raised in reanalysis work by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and debates within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change community. Limitations include handwriting legibility issues noted in collections from the Victorian era and sparse metadata for some merchant vessel logs held by private archives and commercial shipping companies like the historical firms tied to the East India Company.

Category:Citizen science projects Category:Maritime history Category:Climate history