In this talk presented at the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Dr. Victoria Slonosky discusses how citizen scientists around the world have been transcribing historical weather observations. Her project, the McGill DRAW (Data Rescue: Archives and Weather) is working with citizen scientists to transcribe the McGill Observatory weather records, which represent one of the best sets of historical weather in Canada. The complete original records are being transcribed, including variables such as cloud cover and weather symbols. Nearly 1.5 million data points have been transcribed by hundreds of users, with a core group of superusers becoming experts in historical climate observations.
The team behind the project is an interdisciplinary group of researchers from climatology, atmospheric science, geography, archives, and information studies. A feature of this project is the goal of building a traceable dataset from the handwritten archival weather register to the digital database. A recently formed not-for-profit, Open Data Rescue, is currently working with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to transcribe the Canadian records from the 19th century Smithsonian Volunteer Weather Network according to the same principles of completeness and traceability. These projects and others, together with research from ECCC, form the basis of the data rescue work undertaken by ACRE-Canada (Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth) and are an integral part of undertakings such as NOAA's 20th Century ReAnalysis project.
Victoria Slonosky is an historical climatologist. She studied climatology at McGill and earned her PhD in environmental sciences from the Climatic Research Unit, UK. She is currently leading McGill’s Data Rescue: Archives and Weather (DRAW) interdisciplinary citizen science project and is an affiliated member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal. She also leads the Canadian chapter of the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstruction over the Earth (ACRE) project; ACRE-Canada volunteers have transcribed over half a million Canadian historical weather records. In 2021, Slonosky became founding president of Open Data Rescue, a non-profit corporation to discover, curate, transcribe and analyze historical environmental observations. Her book, Climate in the Age of Empire: Weather Observers in Colonial Canada, tells the story of Canada’s scientific heritage in the field of climatology.