Pacific arctic sea-ice observations from U.S. Federal logbooks (1900-1938)

• Main Authors: Wood, Kevin, Purves, Michael, Arthur, Joan, Davis, Milton, De Havilland, Annette, Forcolin, Giulio, Franklin, Stuart, Heikes, Randi
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Arctic Data Center 2019
• Subjects: sea ice; historical; observations; Arctic; Pacific; Pacific Arctic; Sea ice; Alaska; Siberia
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18739/a2s46h60v; https://arcticdata.io/catalog/#view/doi:10.18739/A2S46H60V

This historical sea ice database is constructed from first-hand observations extracted from the logbooks of U.S. federal vessels operating in the Pacific Arctic, and covers the period from 1900 to 1938. During this period the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (becoming the U.S. Coast Guard in 1915) made annual patrols to Arctic Alaska and Siberia, continuing a practice that began in 1880 and that has persisted in a nearly unbroken series to the present day. These data were transcribed by a team of citizen-scientists participating in the Old Weather project, using a collection of high-resolution photographs of the primary sources held by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. Additional work, including reconstruction of the ships’ tracks to hourly resolution from detailed navigational information in the logbooks (e.g. compass bearings, course and distance data), aligning ice observations to the tracks, and compiling and analyzing descriptive sea ice terminology, was jointly produced by experienced Old Weather citizen-scientists and the research team. Descriptive observations are converted into a simple index of ice presence that is presented with a matrix of sea ice and vessel operating terminology recorded in the logbooks. The database also preserves National Archives hyperlinks to the logbook images at the page level in order to facilitate public access and research in the future.