Meteorological data rescue: citizen science lessons learned from Southern Weather Discovery

• Published in: Patterns
• Main Authors: Lorrey, Andrew M., Pearce, Petra R., Allan, Rob, Wilkinson, Clive, Woolley, John-Mark, Judd, Emily, Mackay, Stuart, Rawhat, Sudhir, Slivinski, Laura, Wilkinson, Sally, Hawkins, Ed, Quesnel, Patrick, Compo, Gilbert P.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cell Press 2022
• Subjects: Southern Ocean; New Zealand; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/106159/; https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/106159/1/1-s2.0-S2666389922000800-main.pdf

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.