Weather Detective: An Australian citizen science project

• Main Author: Pudmenzky, Christa
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Indian; Lindley; Pacific; Queensland; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://research.usq.edu.au/item/z2920/weather-detective-an-australian-citizen-science-project

The rescue and analysis of historical weather observations is essential to understand the context of changes in climate and its extremes. One of the largest and yet underused sources of historical meteorological and environmental data are archive collections of ships log books. These logs contain detailed weather observations e.g. air and sea temperature, air pressure, wind, clouds, etc. and qualitative descriptions of sea-ice. Weather Detective is an online citizen science project, jointly run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the University of Southern Queensland as part of National Science Week 2014. It has engaged over 11,000 volunteers in the digitisation of observations from ship log books collected by Queensland’s colourful meteorologist Clement Lindley Wragge. More than 500,000 observations have so far been transcribed from both navy and merchant ship log books that traversed the ocean surrounding the immediate Australasian region, as well as the wider Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans from 1882–1903. The rescued observations from the Weather Detective project have been fed into international climate databases and improving the quality of global historical climate products such as the International Surface Pressure Databank and the 20th Century Reanalysis dataset.