In the News
Old ship records to shed light on Arctic ice loss
Researchers are looking to the past to gain a clearer picture of what the future holds for ice in the Arctic. A project to analyse and digitize ship logs dating back to the 1850's aims to lengthen the timeline of recorded ice data. Ben Gruber reports.
What Can a 19th Century Arctic Shipwreck Tell Us About the 21st Century’s Most Wicked Problem?
Wood and Old Weather are digitizing log books and journals from the Age of Exploration to find out what they can tell us about how the world -- in this case, the Arctic -- has changed in the past 150 years. And they want to see what these changes can tell us about what's happening to our climate.
NPR, Old Ship Logs Reveal Adventure, Tragedy And Hints About Climate
What can yesterday's weather tell us about how the climate is changing today? That's what an army of volunteers looking at old ships' logs is trying to answer through the Old Weather project.
Project to Transcribe Old Ship Logs: Provides Important Weather Data
Kathy Wendolkowski is a citizen scientist ... a happy addiction that she and others have for transcribing old logs from naval ships and other vessels. They perform this task to glean the regularly recorded weather data from those logs for the benefit of science.
NOAA, National Archives team up with citizen-scientists to reconstruct historical climate of the Arctic
Before there were satellites or weather data transmitters or computer databases, there were Arctic sea voyages and sailors dutifully recording weather observations in ship logs. Now a new crowdsourcing effort could soon make a wealth of weather data from these ship logs available to climate scientists worldwide.
National Archives and NOAA Announce Historic Navy Deck Log Digitization Partnership
Thanks to this National Archives–NOAA partnership, and with the aid of citizen scientists, for the first time, anyone, anywhere, will have online access historic Navy, Coast Guard, and Revenue Cutter ship logs held by the National Archives that detail Arctic voyages between 1850 and World War II. These records offer an unprecedented glimpse of weather data and climate patterns from an age long before the Weather Channel. Digital images of the logbooks will be available on both the National Archives website at www.archives.gov and... more