Meteorological data rescue: citizen science lessons learned from Southern Weather Discovery
Daily weather reconstructions (called "reanalyses") can help improve our understanding of meteorology and long-term climate changes. Adding undigitized historical weather observations to the datasets that underpin reanalyses is desirable; however, time requirements to capture those data fr...
Published in: | Patterns |
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Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Cell Press
2022
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/106159/ https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/106159/1/1-s2.0-S2666389922000800-main.pdf |
Summary: | Daily weather reconstructions (called "reanalyses") can help improve our understanding of meteorology and long-term climate changes. Adding undigitized historical weather observations to the datasets that underpin reanalyses is desirable; however, time requirements to capture those data from a range of archives is usually limited. Southern Weather Discovery is a citizen science data rescue project that recovered tabulated handwritten meteorological observations from ship log books and land-based stations spanning New Zealand, the Southern Ocean, and Antarctica. We describe the Zooniverse-hosted Southern Weather Discovery campaign, highlight promotion tactics, and replicate keying levels needed to obtain 100% complete transcribed datasets with minimal type 1 and type 2 transcription errors. Rescued weather observations can augment optical character recognition (OCR) text recognition libraries. Closer links between citizen science data rescue and OCR-based scientific data capture will accelerate weather reconstruction improvements, which can be harnessed to mitigate impacts on communities and infrastructure from weather extremes. |
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