Old Weather ArcticLARGE-SCALE ENVIRONMENTAL DATA RESCUE THROUGH CROWDSOURCING

K. Wood, P. Brohan, N. Soreide, J. Overland, M. Mollan, E. Hope, L. Mishonova, A. Smith, and more than

16,400 contributors including Joan Arthur

…the award is based around innovation in meteorology, with a particular focus on business and/or public impact…

Old Weather

Scientists want to compare past weather with the weather now

What about the 71%of wet bits?

What about the 71%of wet bits?

Not a problem ship mates…

Old Weather Phases 1 & 2 Royal Navy ships WW1

What is the data like?

The Good

What is the data like?

The Bad

What is the data like?and the Ugly

We do like to enjoy ourselves so here’s another version of ugly – glasses on!

If I wanted to have a go – how does it work?

Draw a box over the data, select the data type

Type what you see…including blanks

Draw a box over the data, select the data type

User interface built by Arfon & Co at ZOONIVERSE

So what do the scientists see? XX marks a problem

This shows the BBC running the results into a view of how the weather was looking around the world on the 19th October 1952.Starboard

The historians have video runs showing ship activities. This is the day after the Battle of JutlandPort

Starboard - Climate

Joan

Moment of Discovery!

Jeannette Island(Ostrov Zhannetty)

Port side

A terrible price

Jeannette crushed

Melville’s party(In the Lena Delta)

De Long’s men carry the logbooks ashore through a mile of broken ice Today (Jane Lubchenco,

NOAA)

Jeannette surgeon’s weather log Supplied by the US Navy Bureau of Medicine Archive after public release of Old Weather – Arctic & photographed at the National Archives by project staff

James M.M. Ambler, USN(1848-1881)

What about the Arctic sea ice then?

Thetis’ ice observations (black text) compared with along-track coverages from HadISST 1979-2004 (max-mean-min)

Is it all so serious? – oh no! History also records….

Extraordinary value-addedOld Weather citizen-scientists produce their own research and project reference material (handwriting, technical terms, place names, etc)

Could not be done with a top-down approach

Currently recorded: natural phenomenon, crew lists, burials at sea, discipline & desertion, ships met, notable events of all kinds…

The bonus: word- date- position-searchable manuscript data

…and some jokers!

HMS Tarantula

…not (HMS) Wonganella

www.oldweather.orgThank you – hope to see you on the OW crew lists