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Earth Science

Using Naval Logbooks To Reconstruct Past Weather and Predict Future Climate 102

Posted by Soulskill from the climate-change-destroyed-the-mermaid's-natural-habitat dept.
Lasrick writes: What a great idea: the Old Weather Project uses old logbooks to study the weather patterns of long ago, providing a trove of archival data to scientists who are trying to fill in the details of our knowledge about the atmosphere and the changing climate. "Pity the poor navigator who fell asleep on watch and failed to update his ship's logbook every four hours with details about its geographic position, time, date, wind direction, barometric readings, temperatures, ocean currents, and weather conditions." As Clive Wilkinson of the UK's National Maritime Museum adds, "Anything you read in a logbook, you can be sure that it is a true and faithful account."

The Old Weather Project uses citizen scientists to transcribe and digitize observations that were scrupulously recorded on a clockwork-like basis, and it is one of several that climate scientists are using to create "a three-dimensional computer simulation that will provide a continuous, century-and-a-half-long profile of the entire planet's climate over time" — the 20th Century Reanalysis Project. Data is checked and rechecked by three different people before entry into the database, and the logbook measurements are especially valuable because they were compiled at sea.
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Using Naval Logbooks To Reconstruct Past Weather and Predict Future Climate More

Using Naval Logbooks To Reconstruct Past Weather and Predict Future Climate

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  • true and faithful account (Score:5, Funny)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @01:21PM (#48319461) Journal

    Faithful, yes, but if he didn't know how to navigate, how 'true' can they be? Eh, not to worry, chances are nobody would ever find those logs anyway, if you get my drift...

    • Faithful, yes, but if he didn't know how to navigate, how 'true' can they be?

      Those people sank, and we do not have their log books. :-P

      I don't think navigation on the ocean was very forgiving before modern electronics. And I gather you still do it the old fashioned way as a back up, in case you ever find yourself without them.

      • US Navy still uses sextant and chronometer (Score:5, Interesting)

        by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @01:33PM (#48319571)

        I don't think navigation on the ocean was very forgiving before modern electronics. And I gather you still do it the old fashioned way as a back up, in case you ever find yourself without them.

        I saw a documentary on a US Navy Aircraft Carrier, it had a relevant incident. The carrier has GPS, LORAN, inertial navigation, etc. Yet every day a sailor steps outside the bridge with a sextant and takes readings on the horizon and sun. (does another sailor do so at night with the stars?). He then goes inside and using a WW2 manufactured mechanical chronometer calculates the position of the ship. When asked why the Navy still uses such ancient mechanical technology the sailor replied that this ship is a warship and is expected to be where it needs to be regardless of whether the fancy electronics is working or not.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by plopez ( 54068 )

          When working with billions of dollars of taxpayer assets everything would be double checked to ensure nothing goes wrong. A colleague of mine was on a missile sub and that was how he described things to me.

          The private sector sees things differently it seems:
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]

          • Well, the thing about the Exxon Valdez spill, is that it happened at night, shortly after leaving Port Valdez. Taking elevations at noon only tells you your latitude, unless you have a very accurate clock, and the sun can only be used in that manner at noon (AFAIK). You could try using another celestial object, but the visibility in the Valdez Narrows tends to be bad even for the region, although the seas are generally less than in Prince William Sound or the rest of the Gulf of Alaska. I presume you're ref

            • Re:Exxon Valdez (Score:4)

              by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @03:58PM (#48320713) Homepage Journal

              I thought the problem with the E.V. was that it's hard to make intelligent decisions when you're drunk, regardless of how much accurate information you have.

              • True. And the Titanic wasn't a navigation fault - too fast for conditions, bad design, and substandard steel plates. Hubris trumps tech most of the time.

              • Joe Hazelwood may or may not have been drunk, but he was provably not on the bridge when the ship struck. Also, he could have been drunk as a lord, and if the ship had not been a glorified Capri Sun, it wouldn't have mattered what he hit. Overall, his role in the spill was pretty minor. Blame Exxon for hiring him, blame them for the tanker's condition, the spill response, and for the travesty of justice perpetrated afterwards: Hazelwood might have had the official responsibility, but singling him out as a s

                • Joe Hazelwood may or may not have been drunk, but he was provably not on the bridge when the ship struck.

                  "My response to the charge of being drunk in charge of a ship is that (a) I wasn't drunk, and (b) even if I was, I was safely asleep in my cabin and therefore not in charge of the ship."

            • Taking elevations at noon only tells you your latitude, unless you have a very accurate clock, and the sun can only be used in that manner at noon (AFAIK).

              As it happens, the Sun and the Moon are only two of the many objects that can be used for Celestial Navigation [wikipedia.org]. And, as far as having a very accurate clock, what do you think a Marine chronometer [wikipedia.org] is for and why all ships are required to have at least one?

              • Where did you get the impression that I was unaware of those things? I did mention the concept, honestly. I am just saying, from long personal experience, that the weather in the specific area of the Valdez Narrows and Arm is extremely unconducive to seeing anything at all, but especially not the celestial sphere. As a method for navigating a supertanker through those same waters, it is entirely useless. Tits on a bull, seriously.

                • I got that impression because the way you posted implied that you weren't familiar with Celestial Navigation and didn't realize that you can get a fairly accurate fix with two objects and a very accurate one with three.

            • Wow, you're a land lubber then, despite living in Valdez... :-)

              OK, where to begin. Disregarding the drunk captain (who I'm told taught navigation in NY to mariners after the incident...), historically first and foremost you don't use celestial navigation if you have land marks to navigate by. That is to say, when in coastal waters, the sextant stays in it's coffer. When you're in coastal waters you use "piloting" skills, hence the name of the specialist you take aboard your ship for extra sensitive tasks. (

              • Definitely a lubber, I appreciate the info. There's never been any evidence to suggest that the radar was off, and at midnight in a totally unpopulated area prone to foul weather, it sounds extremely unlikely.

                It seems the citizenry were sold a bit of a package with the double hull tankers, although perhaps it helps with low-energy collisions.

                • Definitely a lubber, I appreciate the info. There's never been any evidence to suggest that the radar was off, and at midnight in a totally unpopulated area prone to foul weather, it sounds extremely unlikely.

                  You're welcome. The elephant in the room when it comes to maritime safety is really twofold, alcoholism and sleep deprivation. The 6-by-6 watch keeping that is common means watch personell build up a sleep deficit that isn't helped by the rampant alcoholism (fueled by boredom and tradition). So more often than not, the reason ships run aground, esp. at night, is that the one guy on the bridge falls asleep at the wheel. Of course, no amount of radar or other currently available electronic navigation aids wil

        • I'm not surprised they still do this, and no, it is not done at night, just at midday.
        • It's lucky there's no fancy electronics involved in the engine, steering or weapons on a ship then.

          I assume the Navy still have oars in the hold and cannons to fire when they arrive at their target?

          • It's lucky there's no fancy electronics involved in the engine, steering or weapons on a ship then.

            I assume the Navy still have oars in the hold and cannons to fire when they arrive at their target?

            The fancy electronics they are worried about are outside the ship, beyond their control, the GPS satellites. Electronics on board the ship are an entirely different story.

      • If you can use a sextant, you got it made. I don't know anybody who ever got lost pre-GPS. Unfortunately, the damn thing can't predict the weather. All you can do is record what happened, the rest was guesswork. That's where electronics made the difference. Now we can see over the horizon. Hurricanes aren't a surprise anymore.

        • Re:true and faithful account (Score:5, Informative)

          by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @01:43PM (#48319663)

          If you can use a sextant, you got it made.

          Only as long as you have an accurate chronometer that was correctly set. The sextant gives you North/South, but you need the chronometer for East/West

          • What's interesting is that GPS works much in the same way. You aren't measuring angles to known stars, but rather distances from known satellites, and it all works because there are atomic clocks on the satellites so you know exactly when the message left the satellite. It's a much more high tech way of doing almost the exact same thing.

            • Important thing to note. Because of the speed those satellites are traveling, they have to make adjustments to their clocks every so often. As they end up being behind by micro-seconds.

              • Yes, the GPS satellites have to take relativity in to account. But the adjustment is built in, automatic and constant. Even being off by 1 microsecond would introduce a massive error. GPS timing operates on the nanosecond scale.

          • You will need an almanac as well, really. I think only Polaris or (possibly) the Southern Cross can be used for fairly approximate latitude without further data or measurement. Sun: noon altitude varies throughout the year. Basically any other body you need to know time and ephemeris. I am only learning astronavigation now but that's how I understand it.

          • Only as long as you have an accurate chronometer that was correctly set. The sextant gives you North/South, but you need the chronometer for East/West

            Well, that's close, in that you need time, but not necessarily a chronometer. That was what Harrison had against him, the committee favoured a celestial approach to measuring time as well. And that did work, but the calculations were so onerous that they took literally hours to complete, for less accuracy than could be had by Harrison's chronometers.

            If Harrison's chronometers were the only way to determine longitude, then the committee would probably have come around a lot sooner. That Newton himself, as th

      • I don't think navigation on the ocean was very forgiving before modern electronics.
        Of corse it is forgiving.
        What exactly do you think would happen on the ocean?
        The coast is the problem if you believe to be somewhere where you actually are not.
        And as the GPS easy is 40m off hitting a rock by forgetting to adjust the GPS to local environments is a big mistake. Electronics easy give a false idea of safety. Hint: watch your depths log (echo lot)

        • What exactly do you think would happen on the ocean?
          The coast is the problem if you believe to be somewhere where you actually are not.

          Just so. As I learned when I was on a boomer these many years ago, the dangerous part of any patrol is the going out and coming back in, where the water is shallow and mistakes are not easily forgiven....

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by es330td ( 964170 )

        Those people sank, and we do not have their log books. :-P

        How nice of them to self select their data out of the dataset via the Darwin Process.

  • HA! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Holi ( 250190 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @01:25PM (#48319491)

    "Anything you read in a logbook, you can be sure that it is a true and faithful account."

    Says someone who never stood watch in the Navy.

    • Re:HA! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Havokmon ( 89874 ) <rick@NospAm.havokmon.com> on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @01:33PM (#48319565) Homepage Journal

      "Anything you read in a logbook, you can be sure that it is a true and faithful account."

      Says someone who never stood watch in the Navy.

      Especially back before satellites and realtime communications Wanna pick up some 'native' chicks?

      Oh we're a week late because it was REALLY STORMY at sea. See? It says so in the log book.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plopez ( 54068 )

        What to make your bonus? Get that cargo of expensive perishable spices across the Pacific ASAP.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plopez ( 54068 )

        Stormy? The crew on our other ship in the area said it was so nice the native babes were swimming topless....

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Havokmon ( 89874 )

          Stormy? The crew on our other ship in the area said it was so nice the native babes were swimming topless....

          We were attacked by pirates. Fortunately, we were able to fend them off, but we lost Joe (who actually deserted).

      • Especially back before satellites and realtime communications Wanna pick up some 'native' chicks?

        That is exactly how Pitcairn island became inhabited by Christians.

        • The thing that always amazes me in that story is they put Captain Bligh on a row boat in the Pacific and somehow he made it back to England.

          • The thing that always amazes me in that story is they put Captain Bligh on a row boat in the Pacific and somehow he made it back to England.

            From what I understand he did it the same way the Polynesians did it: stellar navigation. Not to England, but to some island he knew about, most likely due west. He was the ship's captain, familiar with the nearby islands. Think about those crazy Polynesians who use stellar navigation to travel between Hawaii and Tahiti!

            Polynesian: The race of many islands

          • Re:HA! (Score:5, Informative)

            by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @04:10PM (#48320821)

            Actually, he only needed to get to Timor in the rowboat, but that was impressive enough (it was a 47-day voyage. Of the 19 men, only one was lost, to hostile natives when they made a landfall at Tofua). Bligh was an excellent seaman. And not a bad guy, his reputation notwithstanding.

          • The thing that always amazes me in that story is they put Captain Bligh on a row boat in the Pacific and somehow he made it back to England.

            And to keep on topic - he continued his log. http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/disco... [nsw.gov.au]

    • Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. Suggesting that human-taken records are faithful is pretty damned flawed. Hell, we can't even trust people to write down important things like major historical events accurately.

      Now... the overall picture described by large volumes of this sort of data does have value in cross-checking other observations/predictions. More data, if its context is properly understood, never actively hurts.

      • On the other hand, inaccuracies for reason others than hiding or underlining AGW may well become statistical noise instead of sabotage

        • I'm honestly not sure what point you're trying to make. For once a less to the point, more verbose post might have been better.

          There's always lots of statistical noise. If the volume of data is large enough, you can still uncover meaningful valuable.

    • Now, that's funny (Yes, I served).

      We had navigation logs, engine logs, bridge logs, radio logs, pretty much logs for everything. And, those were required to be accurate. Even the Boatswain mates had their own logs. Their log, however, I would question ...

  • Don't we already know the average temperature of the planet to better than a tenth of a degree back to the 1890's?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by itzly ( 3699663 )
      Overlapping datasets are always good. Helps to catch mistakes, and helps to reduce error bars.

    • The average temperature calculated from the data of three thermometers randomly spread over the ocean/land gives a different average than a few million thermometers.

      And no, certainly not to 1/10th of a degree. I would be surprised if in old times it was half a degree accurate and would be even more surprised if two thermometers at the same place would show the same temperature, due to "flaws" in scales.

      • The accuracy of an individual measurement is one thing. When you combine the results of many measurements it's reasonable to state the result to a far greater accuracy than the individual measurement. The most straight forward example of this that is know is baseball batting averages. The measurements are either 1 (a hit) or 0 (an out) yet baseball batting averages are reported to 3 decimal places.

        • Rofl, sorry. That made no sense at all.
          If I measure temperatures as: 1.2, 1.2, 1.4
          And you measure the same temperature at the same place with a different (scale) thermometer as: 1.1, 1.3, 1.3 then the average is different.
          And I really doubt avarages are any helpfull anyway ...

          • It comes from the law of large numbers. [wikipedia.org] The more measurements involved the more accurate your results will be.

            • Only if the measurements are accurate.

              What is so difficult to understand that no amount of inaccurate measurements add up into an accurate average ... espeacially if you are not interested in averages but e.g individual averages fir certain months?

              We are not talking here about different measurements of 'the same thermometer' but of many thermometers that are all off by an unknown +/- amount. There is no way to average that out reliable, you only can make an educated guess.

              • Accurate thermometers have been available for well over 200 years. Modern thermometers may be more precise but they aren't necessarily more accurate. There are two kinds of accuracy that are important to thermometers. One is the absolute accuracy, how close the measurement is to the real temperature. The second is repeatable accuracy, how well the thermometer repeats the measurement for given conditions. Even if the absolute accuracy isn't perfect if the repeatable accuracy is good you can get an accur

                • Rate of change implies that the same instruments are used repeatedly over a long time. This is not the case here. The instruments are random. There are not even "same coordinates" measurement except on land. Nevertheless you have a point.

                  I originally only wanted to point out that the "law of large numbers" only has limited force in this case :D

    • Independent confirmation of results is a fundamental part of the scientific method. For example it has been known since the 1990's that tree rings are an unreliable climate indicator after ~1960, nobody knows why, but they do know that it doesn't match the other lines of evidence, which includes the modern instrumental records. This is what the infamous "Mike's trick in Nature" quote was referring to in the 'climategate' beat up, the truncation of a data set that was known to be wrong. The character assassi
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Offtopic: What is with the egregious clickbait (Score:3, Informative)

    by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @01:56PM (#48319785)

    at the bottom of the classic slashdot homepage.

    9.5 out of 10 on the annoying and intelligence-insulting scale.

    Dice please exterminate this local outbreak of this putrid Internet fungal growth.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      Apparently Adblock does work

    • I disabled Javascript on Slashdot. The site suddenly became far more usable, and the clickbait ads went away.

      (I also disabled images, and the usability shot up again.)

  • assumptions (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    1. Accuracy - What kind of precision instrumentation was available aboard ship 200 years ago? I don't recall seeing any paintings or pictures where an anemometer/touchless IR thermometer/etc was depicted.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In 1850, +-0.1 C...about.

  • Anything you read in a logbook, you can be sure that it is a true and faithful account.

    Seriously? You believe that?

    Maybe there still IS a market for bridges and ocean front property in Flagstaff, AZ.

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