From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Pretend for a moment you're a climate scientist desperate to get accurate ocean temperatures from a century ago. Where would you find them?
Then someone reminds you Britannia ruled the waves at that time, and that the Royal Navy was punctilious about recording daily weather details. Each warship's logbook contains pages of handwritten information on wind speed and direction, cloud formation and water temperatures from virtually every ocean.
But that still leaves you with a problem. How do you accurately transcribe such handwritten figures into electronic data that can be crunched by computer into useful climate models?
The answer, explains Kevin Sumption - the newly appointed director of the Australian National Maritime Museum - was to turn what would once have been a tedious job for professional archivists into an online computer game set in World War I.
Log on to oldweather.org and you will see what he's talking about.
Full article available at Sydney Morning Herald, December 19, 2011.
