This could be good for Science Week, which started today. Help Ed Hawkins and his colleagues.
Details from the website:
On 26th October 1859, the Royal Charter ship was driven onto rocks in hurricane-force winds and sank off the coast of Anglesey with the loss of 450 lives and a large insurance bill for gold cargo. As a result, the new Meteorological Office, led by Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, was tasked with making the first ever forecasts of the weather, particularly to warn ships about approaching storms in order to save lives.
But to make a forecast requires data. The development of the electrical telegraph allowed FitzRoy to establish a network of weather monitoring sites around the UK whose observations could be sent to London and collated quickly. This data was used to make a daily forecast and to issue storm warnings if required.
The images you see in this project are the weather observations collated in the early years of this endeavour, written by FitzRoy himself until 1865, and by his successors afterwards. Each image captures the weather conditions on a particular day across the UK and north-western Europe. The Times newspaper published the detailed weather observations every day after September 1860 and the forecasts from August 1861 onwards.
However, this weather data cannot currently be used by meteorologists and climate scientists because it has not been digitised – it all still lives in the Met Office’s archives waiting to be discovered.
We need your help!
British Science Week will take place between 8 – 17 March 2019, and is the UK’s largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths. Every year, the UK public are asked to help tackle a problem set by the research community by getting involved in the British Science Week citizen science project – and this year is no different!
One of the biggest problems that researchers face is access to historical data sets. Before we had computers or the internet, early scientists would often write and collect their data by hand in books or papers. Many of these records have now been scanned or are held as an archive in libraries across the globe. However, much of the data within these books hasn’t been digitised – the most accurate way of doing this is manually entering the data into a computer.
Working with the University of Reading, the Natural Environment Research Council, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the Met Office, British Science Week has identified two decades of important historical weather data that has never been digitised. All in all, we have over 2.5 million pieces of data that we need entered from this period – something that would take the research team years to enter themselves.
If we manage it, this will be the first time that climate scientists and meteorologists from around the globe will have had access to the raw data. This could mean not only that we have a better understanding of the climate from the past, but also could help us understand what the future could look like for us as well.
Comments