JISC

Latest News (October 2011): This project has now resulted in the transcription over 670,000 pages of logbooks, recording the journeys and weather relating to 171 ships. A full report is to follow.

This project aims to digitise the National Archive's collection of ships' logs from the period around the First World War. These logs harbour information of particular interest to naval historians, but also serve a pressing need for historical weather observations in the climate science community.

As part of the original Old Weather project, a community of citizen scientists is already working through a subset of logs and have, in the first six weeks of the project's existence, transcribed almost 200,000 logbook pages containing well over a million individual weather observations

The project is imaging another 3000 logs currently held by the National Archives, and to develop advanced interfaces, which will allow volunteers not only to transcribe the data but also to provide quality control.

The result will be a complete, searchable archive of historical and weather information drawn from the logs, freely accessible and ready for use by climate scientists worldwide.