Gee, where have we seen this pioneered for gathering data before? Of course, Professor Stott saw fit to not invite Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., myself or anyone who has any experience with this sort of thing to the Exeter meeting of surfacetemperatures.org. But as they say, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”.
Your chance to help chart past climate
12 October 2010
Voyages of World War One Royal Navy warships are being used to help scientists understand the climate of the past and unearth new historical information, with help from the public.
Visitors to the website OldWeather.org, which launches today, are being invited to input weather observations of the routes taken by any of 280 Royal Navy ships. Once on the website, volunteers will be asked to transcribe information from the digital copies of historical logbooks, making notes of weather and any interesting events.
Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said: “Historical weather data is vital because it allows us to test our models of the Earth’s climate: if we can correctly account for what the weather was doing in the past, then we can have more confidence in our predictions of the future. Unfortunately, the historical record is full of gaps, particularly from before 1920, and at sea, so this project is invaluable.”
Dr Chris Lintott of Oxford University, one of the team behind the OldWeather.org project added: “These naval logbooks contain an amazing treasure trove of information, but because the entries are handwritten they are incredibly difficult for a computer to read. By getting an army of online human volunteers to retrace these voyages and transcribe the information recorded by British sailors we can relive both the climate of the past and key moments in naval history.”
OldWeather.org forms a key part of the International ACRE Project, which is recovering past weather and climate data from around the world and bringing them into widespread use. Met Office Hadley Centre scientist Dr Rob Allan, the ACRE project leader said: “Reconstructing past weather from these historical documents will help further our knowledge of weather patterns and climatic changes.”
Most of the data about past climate comes from land-based weather monitoring stations which have been systematically recording data for over 150 years. The weather information from the ships at OldWeather.org, which spans the period 1905–1929, effectively extends this land-based network to 280 seaborne weather stations traversing the world’s oceans.
The weather records digitised by Old Weather will be added to the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set, and will be freely available for all uses.
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h/t to WUWT reader DavidS
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I hope their quality control is good, William Connolly now has a lot of time available for this sort of thing………..
And when the historical data does not match the results produced by the models, they will secretly, BUT scientifically adjust the historical data rather than the models, because the models are right and the planet is wrong.
Anybody who queries this methodology is an idiot and clearly not a climate scientist, and is funded by big oil. So there! (With knobs on)
Met Office is a guardian of the longest uninterrupted source of temperature data i.e. CETs, a great benefit to any climate researcher. I hope they do look with open eyes and mind at every new effort and attempt to better understanding of those data, the causes and consequences.
The CETs and climate movements are not ‘chaotic’, there is a fundamentally good reason for getting out of the Little Ice Age, it is likely that the same physical process caused the medieval warming period including sudden plunge into the LIA.
By close monitoring of the NAP process (as shown in the attached graph) it may be possible to anticipate in good time another radical change in direction of the climate movements.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NAP.htm
What a novel idea, using anecdotal historical evidence to come to a better understanding of our climate. Who’d thunk it? Well, better late than never. I’m going to volunteer to participate when time permits!
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” – unless you’re Raymond Bradley in which case its called plagiarism?
My issue is that they can’t have it both ways – steal your ideas without attribution on one hand yet squawk when a “white paper” is not referenced to some ambiguous standard.
If I were you – I would send a letter to them (and NOAA) demanding explicit attribution.
REPLY: Crowdsourcing science preceded the surfacestatons project. For example the SETI@home project. While I’m sure that my work had some influence on Stott, and my work was presented at the Exeter meeting by a hostile presenter (Dr. Matt Menne), I most certainly cannot claim any patent or copyright on the idea of crowdsourcing climate data gathering. But, a hat tip would have be nice. But, as we know, we aren’t dealing with nice people. – Anthony
Americans can also plow through the data stashed away
by the Army Signal Corps from 1861 – 1942 titled:
“U.S. Army Signal Corps/Weather Bureau Annual Reports, 1861-1942”
and found at:
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/cso/data_rescue_signal_corps_annual_reports.html
These annual reports are spotty for the first 10 years,
but they pick up in quantity and quality in the mid 1870’s.
The are some good weather system maps in the reports,
and one of the first international weather maps ever created.
I brought this up a year or so ago at Climate Audit. Some
folks pooh-poohed the mound of information because of
the “old” instrumentation involved.
Here’s the perfect new job for Connolley, he can read, distort, and input the old logs during the 6 months that he’s relieved of duties at WP.
Is it just me or are there real problems with this. Do the logs describe how the temps. were taken: windy day, calm day, ship againt the wind, with the wind, on the deck, on the bridge, in the sun, in the shade? What about the time of day: one day early a.m., one day later a.m., noon, afternoon, evening? And then location? Isn’t there something wrong here? Is this really scientific method? And how bout the volunteers?How are they vetted? Will they transcribe the logs correctly? They end result will be something totally subject to interpretation. Maybe what they want.
Our waste of taxpayer dollars is: ‘worse than we thought’.
Could I suggest that anyone who gets involved in this make their findings public so that any “adjustments” to the collated result can be spotted?
I wonder what QA system they will put in place to ensure that the untrained visitors to the website don’t make any mistakes in the wrong direction.
I signed up to this, thinking it was a good idea. Having transcribed a couple of pages now I see that it is going to be very hard, very slow, and very expensive to get good quality results from this project. To give just one example, I had to redo a page when I realized the person making the log entries wrote his 7s so they looked like 4s. Much of his writing was completely unintelligible; beautiful and stylish and consistent no doubt, but unreadable. He also seemed to use a notation all his own for some data. Net result: a lot of gaps in what I transcribed, and low confidence in what I did transcribe. It’s going to be a nightmare to do the QA.
Chris Lintott is famous for his appearances on the BBC both in their “The Sky at Night” broadcasts and on an ad hoc news expert basis. I think he is a genuine guy and the MO are right in saying that if they can put all RAW data into this wonderful new database for open use then the science will have moved a long way but it is not their doing. They would never have done this if not for the pressure from blogs such as Anthony’s and SteveMc.
I hope they find it in their phsycy to do an honest and thorough job but I have my doubts especially if, as the data is aggregated, it starts to show wrongdoing at the MO .
vukcevic says:
October 15, 2010 at 9:19 am
The CET data is adjusted. It is not raw. Be careful. Armagh is better but as they pointed out to me on more than one occasion , it still has it’s problems with location and instrumental changes
“Gee, where have we seen this pioneered for gathering data before? Of course, Professor Stott saw fit to not invite Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., myself or anyone who has any experience with this sort of thing.“…”But, a hat tip would have be nice. But, as we know, we aren’t dealing with nice people. ”
You really can be a right sour-puss at times, Anthony.
REPLY: Peter, walk a mile in my shoes for a day, experience the insults, the mudslinging, the ridicule, and yes even the hatred that I experienced for starting and writing about the surfacestations project, and then you might understand.
You have not done one constructive thing over the years except complain about people like me and the work. I’ve actually done the work, despite people like yourself telling me how wrong or stupid it is, and yet, my work was presented at Exeter (without attribution in some cases) and now they are following the lead without so much as a peep of acknowledgment. The paper coming will change a lot of this, but I fully expect “nice” people to trash it because it really doesn’t fit their world view.
Remember this? “In a way, this is cheering news” (Climategate email from CRU on the Death of skeptic John Daly). Or how about the fact the Dr. Menne used my incomplete data (against my formal written protests) to write a preemptive strike paper before I could actually finish the surfacestations project? Yeah, really nice people.
Of course if the situation were reversed, you would be howling FOUL! You really do need some perspective on yourself and the people you support. – Anthony
Hopefully they will store the scans as well as well as the transcriptions. The evolution of curfive, I mean cursive may be challenging and should be reviewed carefully review by linguistic historians.
The concept of using members of the public to obtain data is valid, assuming that there are adequate controls or verification techniques in place. There are well known scientific endeavours where “amateurs” still have a significant role to play. One that comes to mind is Astronomy.
As for the weather records mentioned in the article, old naval data may be an excellent source.
vukcevic says:
October 15, 2010 at 9:19 am
By close monitoring of the NAP process (as shown in the attached graph) it may be possible to anticipate in good time another radical change in direction of the climate movements.
How could they do this if you have not described the ‘process’? Perhaps you are reserving that for your 2-page Nobel Prize paper…
Related project here:
http://www.corral.org.uk/Home
Check out (eg) HMS Fury and HMS Hecla’s Northwest Passage expedition, 1824 – 1825… interesting stuff.
http://www.corral.org.uk/digitised-logbook-observations/hms-hecla-1824-5
Would there also be an Urban Heat Island Effect on those metal ships?
send a email to them stating your thoughts
It might be interesting to grab all the original data. I bet the original data will disappear when the massaged “value added” data gets out…
Ecotretas
Is this a wise move by the Met Office. I mean if data comes in to show warmer than present average Arctic temperatures / sea temperatures what will they say? Transcription errors, deranged seaman, heat from the propellers. :o)
I think genealogy sites have done something like this, transcribing vital statistics and immigration records to text files and keeping the scans too for future quality control.
One simple QA technique is to have two people transcribe the same document and compare the two results. I have a little experience with transcribing from legible sources, it sounds like these could be pretty challenging, at least until one learns the writing style of the various authors.
Anthony,
You mentioned a Professor Stott in your introduction, which gave me a bit of a shock. Then you listed Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office within the body of the post, so all seems well. You may no have been aware that there is another Professor Philip Stott who is a staunch sceptic as far as politicians are concerned.
“Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. In this blog, I hope to be able to deconstruct the ‘myth’ in order to reveal its more dangerous and humorous foibles and follies. I shall focus as much on the politics as on the science.”
Here is his blog. He is absolutely not a man who would decry all your good work.
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/A_Hot_Topic_Blog.html
Best wishes,
Perry
REPLY: Thanks, I found out today that there are two George Taylors also. – Anthony
Why just World War One Royal Navy warships, the Navy has records that go back much further.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/08/03/captains%e2%80%99-logs-yield-clues-to-past-climate-and-hurricanes/