A New Kind of War Effort

PROBLEM: During World War II, sailors on U.S. Navy ships in the Pacific Ocean were required to log meteorological conditions every hour. However, these observations were kept classified for decades, and even when finally declassified were still mostly in paper form and not easily accessible.

A logbook page from the USS Farragut on the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 Dec 1941. It includes the ship’s name, passage to/from, date, zone, commanding officer, meteorological information, and navigation information. 
[Image Credit: Teleti et al. 2023]

SOLUTION: A recent initiative enlisted the aid of citizen scientists to digitize the records. After working with archivists to photograph and scan each page, researchers started the Old Weather-WWII project, a crowdsourcing effort to recruit volunteers to transcribe the observations from the scanned images. More than 4,100 citizen scientists helped to digitize more than 630,000 records taken from the logbooks of 19 ships. Each record included observations on various conditions including barometric pressure, sea surface temperature, visibility, wind speed and direction, and wet- and dry-bulb temperature; the project rescued 3.7 million of these observations for the years 1941–45. These data “had never been seen by anybody else except the people who wrote them,” notes Praveen Teleti of the University of Reading, who led the research, and the observations help to close a gap in the climate record and should lead to improved accuracy in models. The new data more than doubled previously available observations for some parts of the Pacific. “We were very inspired by the sense of duty [the sailors] had for their work,” Teleti says. “They probably never thought 80 years from that time anybody would be looking at these observations.” An article on the project was published in Geoscience Data Journal. [Source: Eos]

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