old-weather-log

 

 

Congratulations to one of the Zooniverse’s senior projects – oldWeather (http://oldweather.org) is celebrating its third birthday tomorrow!

 oldWeather is looking at ship’s logbooks. These have a lot of weather and climate information in them, and this is what we’re mostly after – but one of the great things about citizen science is that by getting lots of people to look at something, we see the value in it that we missed at first. The participants in oldWeather have found all sorts of amazing and wonderful things in the logbooks we’re reading – so much so that we now learn, and record, almost as much history as science.

Recovering all the old climate records we need is a big job: over the last three years we’ve read more than a million pages of logbooks, but there are many more to look at, so we still need your help. The present logs on the site are of voyages to the Arctic – not an easy place to sail, so there’s occasional drama and disaster to go with the scientific records of ice and weather. If you can help, please go to http://oldweather.org and pick your ship. Don’t forget: the person who classifies the most pages on each ship becomes the captain 🙂

There are many more details and examples on the blog (http://blog.oldweather.org), and a friendly and helpful community on the project forum (http://forum.oldweather.org). Remember, to keep up with all news, results and amazing images from Old Weather you can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Google+.