‘Old Weather’ Project Yields Amazing Data Visualizations

Two years ago, I reported on a “citizen-science” project called Old Weather. You might be familiar with the premise of these types of projects — scientists crowdsource some element of the research that’s too big, or too time consuming, to be done by the few. So, they ask the public to help.

There are other projects, for example, where the public can help out with cancer research, or with searching for alien life.

What drew me to the Old Weather story, though, was the historical aspect. The raw climate data the scientists were after is contained in old British Royal Navy ships’ logs from around World War I. These old handwritten logs were stowed away in an archive. Historians were as interested in the data as the climate scientists. Here’s a bit of the transcript from my original radio piece:

CLARK BOYD: Climate scientists rely on computer models to get a better sense of the Earth’s weather and climate patterns now and in the future. Those models make use of historical weather data. But that information isn’t always easy to come by. There are good land-based weather records starting around 1920. But if you want raw weather data from before that?

PETER STOTT: We have to depend on observations from ships.

BOYD: That’s Peter Stott, head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at Britain’s Meteorological Office. He says that every ship in Britain’s Royal Navy kept logbooks.

STOTT: It’s the weather observations that they made, typically six times a day, and the data that’s in there is the temperatures, so it’s the air temperature and the sea temperature, and also the wind direction and the wind speed and also the pressure that they measured.

BOYD: But all of those observations are bound up in thousands of handwritten volumes, tucked away in archives. Stott says it would take a team of researchers decades to digitize all the information. And handwriting recognition software, he says, isn’t good enough yet to automate the process. So, he decided to get some help from the public. First, Stott turned to Chris Lintott at the University of Oxford. Lintott says they’re scanning the pages of the old log books, and posting them on the website OldWeather.org.

CHRIS LINTOTT: Old Weather.org is an attempt to unlock that information in the logs by inviting members of the public to come along and transcribe the information.

BOYD: They’ve started with 280 Royal Navy ships from right around World War I. Anyone who wants to help can go to the site, choose a ship, and pages of the old naval logs pop up.

Well, two years on and 1.6 million data points later, the project is done. The climate data is only beginning to be analyzed, and the project itself is now looking for volunteers to help input data from US ships in the Arctic! But Old Weather, it turns out, is about much more than just weather. Historians and big data lovers alike are geeking out on the pictures painted by all that information. Check out this visualization:

Ship movements from oldWeather from Philip Brohan on Vimeo.

Also, this very cool version of the same data done by London’s Guardian newspaper.

Follow @clark_boyd

Read the Transcript
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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. One bit of news all of us hunger for daily, almost without exception is the weather. Everyone can use a forecast to plan their day or week. Well, right now we’re going to talk about something a bit different, a project called oldweather.org. It’s a citizen science effort which we first told you about a couple of years ago. Climate researchers in Britain opened up old Royal Navy Ships’ Logs from around World War I, and they invited anyone to come to the website, look at the scanned pages and input the weather data they saw. The World’s Clark Boyd originally covered this story for us and remind us, Clark, why digitize old ships’ logs? What can they tell us about climate change?

Clark Boyd: Well these are these old logs that the British Navy ships kept, and every six hours without fail they would note the ship’s position, what the weather was like, barometric pressure, wind speed, all of those sorts of things, and when I did the original story, Marco, it was funny because I had one historian tell me, ‘You know, it didn’t matter if they were in the middle of a battle with another ship. They would stop and take note of the weather.’ So what they hope to do is by crowd-sourcing this and getting people to help input this data they could get this amazing new set of information about where these ships were, what the weather was like in that particular place at that particular time.

Werman: Now the crowd to which this project was sourced could be described I guess loosely as ‘nerds’, but thank goodness for these nerds because they’ve been so obsessive and comprehensive about inputting the data.

Boyd: Yeah, I mean I think what happened was that this was so much more than just nerds who got interested in doing this. People with an interest in history, especially an interest in naval history, maybe they had a relative who served on one of these ships, they managed to do this in just two years. And this was looking at every page of those logs, thousands and thousands of pages, three times because they had to, you know they wanted to triple check that they were getting the data right. 1.6 million new pieces of information about the climate at that time, it’s, you know for researchers it’s just incredible.

Werman: Now that’s the data, but visually how does it appear? Because that’s incredible.

Boyd: Well, I mean it’s not just the fact that all this data’s created, it’s what people have done with it, right Marco? I mean you’ve got people who have come in and taken that data and essentially plotted out on a world map where all of these Royal Navy ships were moving at the time, and they’ve put them into, you know, visualization programs that kind of, you know, show these ships as kind of in a time lapse way and they’re flying all across the globe. You know, I can talk about it but the best thing is to come to theworld.org and take a look at some of the visualizations and links that we have there.

Werman: So what’s next for old weather?

Boyd: So, because they’re done with this project already, I think it shocked them how quickly they got done with it, so what they’ve done is they’ve moved on to a new set of logs about ships in the arctic. And so you can go up to oldweather.org and work on that project. Now it’ll be a whole new set of climate data.

Werman: The World’s Clark Boyd, thank you so much for the update.

Boyd: You’re welcome, Marco.

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