Large-scale environmental data recovery and analysis for the North Pacific – Arctic region, 2014-2015

• Main Authors: Wang, Muyin, Wood, K.R.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Axiom Data Science 2020
• Subjects: Arctic; Pacific; Pacific Arctic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.24431/rw1k454; https://search.dataone.org/#view/10.24431/rw1k454

This study focused on the large-scale recovery of Arctic and North Pacific historical environmental data—amounting to millions of individual observations—and making them available for new research, such as extended retrospective analysis (reanalysis) to study a range of lower-frequency climate phenomena and better understand their impact on the Arctic environment. This Excel spreadsheet is a manifest of 105,315 high resolution digital images of selected vessel logbooks that were digitized by University of Washington staff and student-interns from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015 at imaging stations at the National Archives (in Washington, D.C. and College Park, MD locations). The original manuscripts are held at Archives 1 and 2, and the U.S. National Archives (NARA) maintains the digital images on the NARA computer system accessible via the national catalog. The temporal range of the collection spans 1844 to 1960 (nominal) and includes archival assets for federal vessels, including the US Navy and US Coast Guard. Geographic coverage is global, with an emphasis on the North Pacific and Arctic. The information contained in the digitized vessel logbooks includes historical weather, sea ice, and other environmental observations of the Arctic. This collection is an extension of digitizing effort that occurred under NPRB Project 1124, Environmental data rescue in the North Pacific and Arctic through a citizen-science initiative, and NPRB Project 1226, Crowd sourcing large-scale environmental data recovery for the North Pacific – Arctic region from 1850 to the satellite era.