Explorers like Ernest Shackleton (pictured), Captain Cook and Benjamin Franklin are being used to help fill gaps in the climate change record. The data may also be useful in weather prediction.

Credit: Wikimedia

- Advertisement -

BRISBANE: Famous explorers and scientists like Captain Cook and Benjamin Franklin are being used to help fill the gap in climate records, thanks to the work by a British organisation.

Historic records about weather conditions are to be included with millions of others in a database that aims to reconstruct 250 years of weather.

The UK-based project called The Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) is gathering, digitising and making available global weather records, in an effort to assist weather forecasters and climate researchers.

"As far as we're aware, it's the only project of its type in the world," says Rob Allan, the climate researcher who is leading the ACRE project.

"Millions of observations"

Detailed, global weather record collections usually only go back to the 1950s, Allan says, and have a heavy emphasis on temperature and precipitation, so their usefulness is limited for climate researchers who want to test their models or quantify just how climate has changed over the last few hundred years.

In contrast, the ACRE team is collecting all sorts of weather and climate measurements - wind speed, cloud cover, atmospheric pressure, and even sea ice distribution - which are mostly found as paper records in logbooks, journals and diaries, hidden away in archives around the world and going back as far as the early 18th century.

"[There's] an enormous quantity of information - terabytes of data, hundreds of millions of observations, hundreds of thousands of documentary pages," says Allan's ACRE colleague Philip Brohan.

Records from the southern hemisphere are less abundant than those for the northern hemisphere, Allan says, but there's still plenty of information that could be useful.

Scientists travelling with Cook and the early explorers of Antarctica - the likes of Shackleton, Scott and Mawson - kept valuable and detailed records, says Allan, and whaling, merchant and navy ships, and remote meteorological outposts are other southern-hemisphere sources.

Google it

To make all that data more easily accessible, the researches are collaborating with Google to display the information visually in Google Earth and Google Maps, allowing general users to see the information's spread across time and space, Brohan says.

For example, it's possible to view measurements of sea temperature, made by American statesman Benjamin Franklin during a voyage in 1785, laid out as colour-coded marks along his route in Google Earth, and to compare them to current sea temperatures.

"Our ambition is to make as much of our data as possible available through these tools, so that anybody who's at all interested can look at those series," Brohan says.

The enormous, freely available databases will give us a comprehensive look how the climate has changed in the last 250 years, Brohan says, and will allow forecasters and climate researchers to test their models thoroughly and fine-tune them.

That's what Gil Compo, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado, is most interested in.

Past predicting the future

"We want to be able to verify climate model simulations that are used to project global warming: How have they done simulating storms in the past?" Compo says.

Using their model, Compo's team makes a estimate of what the climate should have been at a certain point in the past, and then compares it to the actual historical records, in a process called a reanalysis.

Compo looked at the historic hurricane that devastated Long Island, US, in 1938, when it turned north instead of back out to sea as expected.

Using data gathered 36 hours before the storm hit Long Island, the team have devised a model to predict the northerly path of the hurricane - enough time to give residents ample warning in a similar situation.

"We were able to recreate [the storm's path], using only the surface observations," Compo says. "This gives us great confidence that we'll be able to reconstruct the historical tropical cyclones around the world, and determine how they're changing and how well our climate models simulate them."

Allan hopes that the project's data will help settle concerns from climate change sceptics about the trustworthiness of climate models.

"All the data plus these reanalyses will be freely available on the web…Sceptics, anybody, will be able to get at this data, to be able to use it, to look at it, and to evaluate things," he says.