Help Map Historical Weather From Ship Logs by Caitlin Dempsey.
From the post:
The Old Weather project is a crowdsourcing data gathering endeavor to understand and map historical weather variability. The data collected will be used to understand past weather patterns and extremes in order to better predict future weather and climate. The project is headed by a team of collaborators from a range of agencies such as NOAA, the Met Office, the National Archives, and the National Maritime Museum.
Information about historical weather, in the form of temperature and pressure measurements, can be gleaned from old ship logbooks. For example, Robert Fitzory, the Captain of the Beagle, and his crew recorded weather conditions in their logs at every point the ship visited during Charles Darwin’s expedition. The English East India from the 1780s to the 1830s made numerous trips between the United Kingdom and China and India, with the ship crews recording weather measurements in their log books. Other expeditions to Antarctica provide rare historical measurements for that region of the world.
By utilizing a crowdsourcing approach, the Old Weather project team aims to use the collective efforts of public participation to gather data and to fact check data recorded from log books. There are 250,000 log books stored in the United Kingdom alone. Clive Wilkinson, a climate historian and research manager for the Recovery of Logbooks and International Marine Data (RECLAIM) Project, a part of NOAA’s Climate Database Modernisation Program, notes there are billions of unrecorded weather observations stored in logbooks around the world that could be captured and use to better climate prediction models.
In addition to climate data, I suspect that ships logs would make interesting records to dovetail, using a topic map, with other records, such as of ports, along their voyages.
Tracking the identities of passengers and crew, cargoes, social events/conditions along the way.
Standing on their own, logs and other historical materials are of interest, but integrated with other historical records a fuller historical tapestry emerges.