Deck logs in The National Archives¶
The National Archives (TNA) Admiralty records of HM ships contain many records with weather observations. The format and contents of the logs vary greatly, but they often contain records of pressure, air temperature, wind speed and direction, sea temperature, and often other variables, every few hours.
Sample page from a ship’s deck log
We have done several digitisation projects using this archive, over the past few years:
These projects have been very successful at demonstrating the value of this archive source, but they involved a lot of work and have only digitised a small fraction of the full archive. We should digitise more from this source, but we are going to need a more efficient process for doing so.