Project: Data Rescue @ Home
Pity the poor, unloved bit of historical data: Unloved, unanalysed, and *gasp* analog, instead of digital. Brother, can you spare some time?
The Data Rescue @ Home project would like your help in digitizing historical weather data, to help researchers better understand climate change. The project is currently working with two historical data sources: German radiosonde data from the Second World War and meteorological station data from Tulagi (Solomon Islands) from the first half of the 20th century.
The WWII data includes measurements from Germany, France, Danmark, Italy, Poland, Austria and Estonia. Geodynamic height, temperature and relative humidity were recorded from 1000 hPa to 50 hPa.
The Tulagi data measurements include air pressure, dry and wet bulb temperature, maximum and minimum temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed, cloud cover, weather, and precipitation amount.
According to the website, “The old data are expected to be very useful for different international research and reanalysis projects (e.g. the Twentieth Century Reanalysis, new surface temperature datasets), and the prolongation of the currently available observational series into the past is of crucial importance for our understanding of the climate system.”
The project is a joint effort between the University of Bern and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
To participate, simply use the registration link at the top of the project’s website, and start digitizing/transcribing the data presented. You’ll be doing valuable work to help us deal with one of the most urgent problems of the 21st century.
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