Second order stations - twice-daily reporting

‘Stations of the Second Order’ were those that are not run by Met Service staff. Because they were not manned by full-time professionals, they mostly reported observations less often, only twice daily. They are of particular importance for digitisation as their records were published in printed form. The NMLA have these records as digital images for the period 1873-1921.

Sample section (1 station for 1 month) from the Second-order stations publication.

As a bulk source of printed observations in a common format, this is a tempting target for automated transcription tools. These are not yet available, but this is likely to change soon as this is an area of active research and development (see, for example https://aws.amazon.com/textract/). We should probably postpone any work on this source until such tools come into use.