Improving Arctic reanalysis with citizen-science

Old Weather (www.oldweather.org) is a successful citizen-science project supported by an ad hoc consortium of partners, including NOAA, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, and by thousands of volunteers (www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic/rediscover/). Old Weather has already transcribed millions of new-to-science weather records; these have been integrated into existing global data sets, and are being used by at least five reanalysis projects today. These data have been shown to substantially increase the precision of reanalysis, especially in remote regions like the Arctic with inherently poor data coverage.

This paper will present progress to date as well as several spin-off student projects.