https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-century-old-arctic-shipwreck-could-help-us-predict-extreme-weather/
A Century-Old Arctic Shipwreck Could Help Us Predict Extreme Weather
In 1879, the USS Jeannette and her crew left San Francisco, headed for the Bering Strait with a dream: to win the race to reach the North Pole. After months of perilous sailing, the Jeannette made it through the strait. But soon after, she got stuck in the grip of ice floes, or sheets of floating ice.
For two years, members of the Jeannette’s crew waited, recording observations about the strange Arctic world around them in the ship’s logbooks: temperatures, barometric pressure, features of the beautiful auroras above them and more. They hoped that the ice sheets would move, releasing the Jeannette and allowing the crew to return to San Francisco. But the ice persisted, and the Jeannette was eventually crushed. She sank to the bottom of the ocean, leaving the surviving members of her crew to trek hundreds of miles across the ice toward safety. Of the 33-member crew that had left San Francisco, only 13 returned.
Today, the Jeannette’s recovered logbooks tell incredible stories about life, death, Arctic temperatures, fear and boredom. The records, which originally existed only in federal archives, are now available to anyone who wants to read them on a website called Old Weather.
Old Weather is a gathering place for more than 4,500 citizen-sleuths who are helping climate scientists map our planet’s ancient weather patterns, for free, one logbook at a time. These volunteers read and transcribe notes from sailors, hoping to map the mostly unknown history of our planet’s weather patterns.
https://www.oldweather.org/about.html
The Project
Old Weather volunteers explore, mark, and transcribe historic ship’s logs from the 19th and early 20th centuries. We need your help because this task is impossible for computers, due to diverse and idiosyncratic handwriting that only human beings can read and understand effectively.By participating in Old Weather you’ll be helping advance research in multiple fields. Data about past weather and sea-ice conditions are vital for climate scientists, while historians value knowing about the course of a voyage and the events that transpired. Since many of these logs haven’t been examined since they were originally filled in by a mariner long ago you might even discover something surprising.
About the Science
Millions of weather, ocean, and sea-ice observations recorded by mariners and scientists over the past 150 years are being recovered by Old Weather. These data are made freely available in digital formats suitable for climate model assimilation, retrospective analysis (reanalysis), and other kinds of research. The performance of data-assimilating modeling and extended reanalysis systems is greatly improved, the uncertainty of results (especially in sparsely observed regions like the Arctic) is reduced, and new long-period calibration and validation data sets are being created. As the historical data resource is extended farther back in time it will be possible to study a wider range of weather and climate phenomena and to better understand their impact on the Arctic and global environment, now and in the future.