From a JISC (UK) Announcement:
Visitors to OldWeather.org, which launches today, will be able to retrace the routes taken by any of 280 Royal Navy ships including historic vessels such as HMS Caroline, the last survivor of the 1916 Battle of Jutland still afloat.
The naval logbooks contain a 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.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC which is funding the project, said: “Solving complex scientific problems used to be restricted to the laboratories of the university campus. But with sites like Old Weather, the general public can play an important role in uncovering the data that underpins the arguments behind climate change. Hopefully, Old Weather can spark a whole range of similar cyber science projects, engaging the public in the grand scientific issues of our time.”
Now, toss-in a Foursquare/GoWalla-Like Rating System for Volunteers:
The ‘virtual sailors’ visiting OldWeather.org are rewarded for their efforts by a rise through the ratings from cadet to captain of a particular ship according to the number of pages they transcribe.
The project is inspired by earlier Oxford University-led ‘citizen science’ projects, such as Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo – that have seen more than 320,000 people make over 150 million classifications – which have shown that ordinary web users can make observations that are as accurate as those made by experts.
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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.
It isn’t just gaps in the weather records that the team hope to fill but gaps in the history books too. OldWeather.org is teaming up with naval historians in an effort to add to our knowledge of the exploits of hundreds of Royal Navy vessels and the thousands of men who served on them.
Access OldWeather.org and a List of Ships
Access the OldWeather.org Blog
Learn More About a Number of Projects from Zoouniverse
I really did love Old Weather and even made Lieutenant on a couple ships!!
I guess I come from a sea-faring family. My grandfather was in the British Navy all his working life.
He was on a ship (HMS Rainbow) which Britain sent to Canada (with another ship, whose name I can’t recall) to help them start their navy. He was based at Squamish (?) on Vancouver Island for 5 years. I have been there and seen all the info on it at the museum there. Very interesting. But his first stint in the navy was in his teens when he went on a sailing ship to the coast of Sierra Leone where the ship was surveying the coast.
The reason I stopped doing the weather watch is that I simply did not have the time.
But I hope I can revise my workload more efficiently so I can take place in this new programme.
Sincerely
Yvonne Wedgwood