Old Ship Logs Reveal Weather Patterns
These days we can find out the temperature anywhere in the world by clicking on our closest device, so why do we need weather observations from over 100 years ago? How could weather records written down by a 19th Century sea captain possibly be useful in the 21st century? Well, that is exactly what Australia’s citizen scientists – also known as Weather Detectives – plan to figure out by transcribing the log books of ships that sailed the seas around Australia in the 1890s and 1900s.
The logbooks contain the information like sea water temperatures, barometric pressure, cloud cover, wind direction, wind strength and swell. Majestic ships under full sail, steam ships, missionary ships and even a couple of slavers are among the ships that are being observed. Queensland meteorologist Clement Wragge from the late 1800s collected the log books.
The weather observations will go into a database called Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth – ACRE – which will be available to anyone.
“The idea was to get a bigger better database of the weather, where we pick up more events like El Niño, La Niña or storms. So instead of 40, 50 years of recent data you could get 150 maybe longer years of data. And then you suddenly get this much more valuable tool to feed into whatever you want to use it for,” says Rob Allan, meteorologist with the UK Met Office, and co-creator with Philip Brohan of Old Weather, the UK version of Weather Detective..
Ambitiously, ACRE aims to put together a full history of our planet’s weather back to 1850 – providing weather details all over the globe for 200 km x 200 km resolutions for every 3-6 hours. The weather details will then be used to reconstruct a 3D picture of what was happening with air masses and air pressure systems at the time.
This project is well underway and should reap some very useful results – from improving weather forecasting, to understanding climate change to re-analyzing serious past weather events, such as the Knickerbocker Storm of 1922 in the U.S.
that matters most
Get the latest maritime news delivered to your inbox daily.
A significant use, and one of the reasons the project was started – is to verify seasonal forecast models which are used by farmers and primary producers for crop production. On a regional level, it could be really useful for understanding how particular climatic phenomena – such as El Niño – may respond to climate change. And that extra length of records may give us more information about how likely extreme events, such as heatwaves or floods, are to occur in the future.
Weather Detective is an online citizen science project undertaken by ABC Science in conjunction with the University of Southern Queensland as part of National Science Week 2014.