Many people fantasize about what life as a historical wayfaring sailor was like. It is even a common subject in films, on TV and in video games. However, several citizen scientist projects are taking old ship logs and using volunteers to turn that fiction into reality. And what do those logs tell us? They show us what life was like at the time, as well as what the weather was like.
Why would we want to know about the weather? Because mariners recorded accurate weather events in history, we can use their records and compare them to today's weather. This potentially allows forecasting for weather in the future.
Scientists have a general idea of Earth's climate over the past several thousand years. However, these old ship logs give a better detailed account. Sailors used to take sea temperature, for example, by sticking a thermometer into ocean water. Those temperatures were regularly recorded in ship logs. Those measurements give modern day scientists an excellent view of overall sea temperature over time, which they can compare to modern readings. Ocean temperature is important in understanding climate change, as oceans cover over 70 percent of Earth.
"As we recover more and more data and we can reanalyze the global weather patterns for those years, we're going to understand more about the way the arctic ice drifts and moves about in those days, which it may or may not do today," says Kevin Wood, a research scientist with NOAA and the University of Washington.
There's just one problem. These ship logs are handwritten, which means that computers can't read them. And that's where two citizen scientist projects come into play. Both OldWeather.org and Weather Detectives are seeking human eyes to transcribe these ship logs into data.
"The idea was to get a bigger better database of the weather, where we pick up more events like El Niño, La Niña or storms," says Rob Allan, meteorologist with the UK Met Office. "So instead of 40 or 50 years of recent data you could get 150 maybe longer years of data."
The ship logs also tell stories of life on the seas and the adventures encountered by sailors. One log detailed a journey of over 1,500 miles to help stranded whalers by bringing them reindeers. Another log details accounts of a sailors being surrounded and trapped by ice for over two years before abandoning their ship.
