What's New
In the Crow's Nest, watching for a 'blow'. "Thar she blows". Photo courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Citizen scientists have a new opportunity to help reconstruct past climate by transcribing data from whaling ship logs. A massive collaboration among government and university scientists, archivists and museum curators, has unveiled Old Weather: Whaling, a sister project of Old Weather that is focused on the Pacific Arctic whaling industry that began in 1849. Volunteers mine massive amounts of sea-ice and weather data from the ship’s logs -- along with amazing stories of the Arctic whalemen. These data are fed to state-of-the-art retrospective analysis (reanalysis) systems and provide ground-truth for sea-ice and climate models, all contributing toward better understanding of the Arctic climate of the future.
Read more about Old Weather and Old Weather: Whaling as well as feature stories on NOAA Research and UW Today from the University of Washington.
PMEL in the News
Even if climate negotiations in Paris are successful, the planet is locked into long-term warming and an uncertain future. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
Today marks the official launch of Old Weather: Whaling, a citizen science research initiative that will help scientists analyze historical data from whaling logbooks.
Feature Publication
Each year, about 60,000 people and $4 billion (US$) in assets are exposed to the global tsunami hazard. Accurate and reliable tsunami warning systems provide a significant defense for this hazard. In this paper, Drs. Eddie Bernard and Vasily Titov (NOAA Center for Tsunami Research/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory) explore the evolution of science and technology used in tsunami warning systems and the evolution of their products using warning technologies. They suggest future... more