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Using Naval Logbooks To Reconstruct Past Weather and Predict Future Climate
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.
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.
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
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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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.