An Integrated Data Rescue-to-Reanalysis Program for Arctic Research (Invited Presentation)

The value of historical data in the geophysical sciences has been recognized since the 19^th century, along with the need for international collaboration in its stewardship and publication. Today, the development of sophisticated data-assimilating modeling and reanalysis systems has created a new need for the recovery of unutilized sub-daily resolution historical data. An estimated 500–750 million new-to-science marine-meteorological records of this type exist in U.S. ship logbooks waiting to be recovered, and of these an estimated 15-20 million records pertain to the Arctic region. These records span the period from the early 1800s to the beginning of the satellite era. An informal consortium of institutions and citizen-scientists have been working together to convert these data from manuscript to digital formats suitable for use by new computationally-intensive research applications. Moreover, the digitization, transcription, and reanalysis of these unique data provide unprecedented opportunities for new research in many other fields, as well as serving the common preservation and public access missions of the U.S. National Archives, NOAA, the UK Met Office, and collaborating libraries and museums.