Imaging and digitisation of historical instrumental weather observations in ship logbooks

A sum of £400,000 split over the next two years - £200,000 in 2007/8 and £200,000 in 2008/9 - has been obtained to image and digitise daily to sub-daily meteorological observations from collections of ship logbooks held in UK repositories. Expenditure will come from the climate research subcontract budget within the Defra/MoD funded Integrated Climate Programme of the Met Office Hadley Center in the UK.

ACRE will oversee this project, which focuses on extracting, imaging and digitising of daily to sub-daily meteorological observations from the following ship logbook collections:

  1. 2007/2008: The British East India Company (EIC) (1780s-1830s) - logbooks held in the British Library (imaging by the British Library, digitised by the Climate Data Modernization Program [CDMP] in the US). (Example logbook page).
  2. 2008/2009: An extended period during and following World War 1 (1914-1923) - logbooks held in the UK National Archives (imaging by the UK National Archives).
  3. 2007/2008: Support/supply/rescue ships used in late 19th - early 20th Century Antarctic expeditions - from printed/published reports primarily held in the Met Office Library & Archives (imaging & digitisation). (Example logbook page - from the Discovery, on Mawson's 1929-31 expedition. This logbook is held in the Australian National Meteorological Library.)

      4. Due to the specialist nature of this work, the initiative will involve close cooperation between ACRE, the Met Office Hadley Centre, the British Library, the UK National Archives, the Climate Data Modernization Program (CDMP) in the US, and Sunderland University in the UK .

      The data obtained by this imaging and digitisation initiative will:

      1. form part of a joint ACRE, Met Office Hadley Centre, and international effort to improve the global historical observational coverage of weather variables (Sea Surface Temperatures, mean sea level pressure, winds, sea-ice, etc);
      2. be used in the ACRE project to support long historical global surface-observations-only, and climate quality, reanalyses.

      These actions will improve our current observational evaluations of climate variability and change, and vital if we are to produce new, long historical climate quality reanalyses for customers and commercial user needs and their model inputs.