Crowdsourcing large-scale environmental data recovery

Over 1,779,458 new-to-science weather records have been recovered so far for the North Pacific-Arctic region from 1850 to the satellite era by the Old Weather team (www.oldweather.org. Old Weather is a 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/).

New-to-science weather records recovered from ship logs have been integrated into existing global data sets, and are being used by at multiple reanalysis projects today, substantially increasing the precision of reanalysis, especially in remote regions like the Arctic with inherently poor data coverage.