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| Page from USS Jamestown (below) log in June 1861 (National Archives) |
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| USS Jamestown (Naval History and Heritage Command) |
Scientists
and volunteers will pore through up to 1,000 U.S. Navy logbooks and digitize
weather observations that will fill in the historical record and perhaps aid in
future weather predictions, thanks to a new grant.
Before
satellites, knowledge of the oceans and climate data was largely restricted to
a ship’s logbook, and few recorded observations were made on land before the
1870s. War has a way of disrupting the collection of weather data and this effort
will focus on 1861-1879, the University of Washington announced recently. The
Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865.
“The better
we understand the past, the better we can make models for the future,” said Kevin Wood, a research scientist with the Joint Institute for the Study of the
Atmosphere and Ocean. He's also a leader of the Old Weather project, which has
transcribed U.S. Navy and Royal Navy weather records.
Besides weather,
this phase of digitalization will include muster rolls and crew data, he told
the Picket. Volunteers previously digitized logs from the USS Jamestown, a
sloop of war that seized vessels off Florida and North Carolina during the Civil War.
Changes in
the Jamestown’s log show officers went from observing only weather conditions
to other details of the day: What the crew saw, punishment, drill and more. A
June 8, 1861, notation, for example, talks about two men confined for fighting,
one being placed in double irons. On June 16, the contingent was in full
uniform and were read the articles of war.
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| More USS Jamestown entries (National Archives) |
Scientists
interested in extreme weather can add this information to data gathered before
and after the Civil War to see if there were any phenomena such as an El Nino,
Wood said.
"The
Civil War is generally this huge missing era of weather overall, and ship logs
the (largely) forgotten piece," Cary Mock, a University of South Carolina
climatologist who has studied the logs for hurricane information, told The Post
and Courier in Charleston.
The newspaper
described a hurricane off Georgetown, S.C., in November 1861, and excerpted
from a diary by Stephen Minot Weld that will be digitized: "One
sea which broke over the ship killed one of Captain Hascall’s horses...The wind
would blow and shriek through the rigging till it seemed as if it could blow no
harder; and when I thought it was at its height, it would scream and whistle
more than ever. There was something terrible to me in the waves, which were
enormously high, and only rendered visible by the phosphorescent light on the
tops of them."
Wood said the project has two components: The scientific aspect and the history of what
happened on the voyages. “You can put some of it under the humanities aspect.
It’s not data. It’s a story.”
Reanalysis
(explained in Q&A below) of the data will allow for experts to spotlight a
specific location and time during the Civil War. “You will be able to generate
a weather map from that campaign.”
The work,
which begins June 1, is being paid for by a $482,018 grant from the nonprofit
Council on Library and Information Resources. The results will be posted on Old
Weather and the National Archives website.
The Picket communicated last month with
Wood by telephone and email. The following are his combined responses, edited
for organization and brevity.
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| Kevin Wood (U of Wash.) |
Q. Why is ship log data
important, specifically when it comes to weather? Does it help with current
prediction and modeling? How does it help us better understand past events?
A. The advent of
high-performance computing combined with a particular method of using
historical data in what is known as retrospective analysis, or more often “reanalysis,”
has really transformed the value of historical meteorological observations like
those found in naval logbooks. Reanalysis can produce objective reconstructions
of the atmosphere at six-hour intervals as far back in time as there are
sufficient data to ingest. Our particular objective is to recover as much
unutilized data as possible, which ultimately increase the quality, resolution and
range of the reanalysis, and hence lead to better understanding of the physical
circumstances of past events (e.g. extreme weather, climate fluctuations,
atmospheric rivers, etc.). This effort is also expected to improve long-range
prediction and modeling of future weather/climate conditions.
Q. How much impact does
the Civil War and current marine logging of weather have on our weather records
and knowledge (i.e. compared to land-based data)?
A. War in general disrupts
the orderly collection and transmission of weather observations, and the Civil
War, in particular, brought the pioneering work of naval officer Matthew F.
Maury to a stop. This disruption can be seen in this animation (from about 7:30 to 10 minutes in):
The
disruption, however, isn't that the weather observations weren't taken on board
the ships. It’s that they were never fully extracted from the logbooks. (That’s)
unlike land stations that may have simply been abandoned or the records lost in
the general destruction.
Also, once
radio and weather forecasting emerged in the early 20th century then ships
began transmitting their observations to national weather services. This was
once the only way to get timely information into forecasters’ hands, and even
up to the first years of my career we would radio a Coast Guard station
(November-Mike-November in my case) with our weather. Now these volunteer
observing ships (VOS) are equipped with satellite comms and often automatic
weather stations.
Finally, in
some parts of the world, there are few land stations (and perhaps none in the
past) and then the marine observations become even more important -- perhaps
the only observations there are. The Arctic, Southern Ocean, tropical Pacific.
Q. Please tell me about how the Old
Weather project feeds into this? What motivates people to volunteer to digitize
this and other historical material? How is the data accessed and who generally
uses it?
A. Old Weather volunteers will help on
it. Start with all the positions, latitude, longitude and time. They can
annotate what they find interesting -- if someone is lost at sea, killed, or
injured … sightings of auroras, volcanoes. Old Weather volunteers help transcribe the weather observed/observations from handwriting
to digital text. Currently, there is no way to do this automatically. There are
as many motivations as people have interests. Some are focused on doing
something to meaningfully help advance the science; others are history buffs.
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| USS Sabine (Library of Congress) |
Q. Can you tell me about marine
weather's impact on how Civil War commanders/captains would have used log data
in their tactical and strategic campaigns?
A. The first part of my
career I was a merchant marine officer, so I know something about the use of
weather obs on a ship: the safety (and
efficiency) of the ship depends on
appropriately understanding and anticipating the weather over the horizon,
often revealed by the hour-by-hour trends in the logged data. For consequences,
look no farther than the El Faro case, the loss of the replica of the HMS
Bounty and too many others. Obviously, even more important in times before
marine weather forecasting was available on the radio. The same kind of judgment
must have gone into the tactical decisions around a naval action during
the Civil War.
Strategically,
knowledge of the climatology of the ocean and its weather could be a
significant advantage in both defense and commerce. This was the object of
Maury's work before the Civil War -- he was trying to systematically collect
the data needed to discern the larger patterns of ocean currents, trade winds,
and so forth. Ultimately this kind of information was used to construct pilot
charts of the world ocean,
sailing directions and coast pilots.
Q. What kind of weather
data was logged during the Civil War and how has that changed over time?
A. The easiest answer is to have a look at some of
the logs.
You can see the wx obs get more detailed with time, but seldom do you find a
log where they aren't taken every hour. The instruments have changed with
time, but the variables are basically the same: wind speed/direction,
barometric pressure, sea-surface and wet/dry air temperature, sea and sky
conditions (sea state, clouds, visibility).
Q. How have sailors and their skills
changed over time?
A. Without weather forecasting info, they paid attention a whole lot more than sometimes we do
nowadays.” Back then, they were completely self-reliant. They had a native
understanding of what they were seeing. They would have had weather sense. You
would think life as sailor today is universally better. But it is not. There is
hubris and pressure by owners to be on time and without interruption. People
still make bad judgments.
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