Ship Logbooks Research Articles

Shifting Roles of Citizen Scientists Accelerates High‐Quality Data Collection for Climate Change Research

ABSTRACTWe are a team of citizen science volunteers and academics presenting a case study about how long‐serving Old Weather (OW) project volunteers left the leading citizen science platform, Zooniverse.org, and created their own opensource transcription tool to capture meteorological data from historic ship logbooks, for climate science. This project, built in LibreOffice Calc (hereafter LOC‐OW) marks a transition from a hierarchical model of crowdsourcing to a co‐productive model in which the roles of the volunteers and the original project owners shifted, the volunteers gained expertise and developed a sense of ownership over the data production tools and process.

Digitizing weather observations from World War II US naval ship logbooks

AbstractThe number and coverage of weather observations over the oceans were considerably reduced during World War II (WW2) due to disruptions to normal trade routes. The observations that do exist for this period are often unavailable to science as they are still only available as paper records or scanned images. We have rescued the detailed hourly weather observations contained in more than 28,000 logbook images of the US Navy Pacific Fleet stationed at Hawai'i during 1941–1945 to produce a dataset of more than 630,000 records. Each record contains the date and time, positional information and several meteorological measurements, totalling more than 3 million individual observations. The data rescue process consisted of a citizen science project asking volunteers to transcribe the observations from the available images, followed by additional quality control processes. This dataset not only contains hourly weather observations of air temperature, sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and wind direction, mainly in the Pacific Ocean but also includes some observations from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The new observations are found to be of good quality by inter‐comparing independent measurements taken on ships travelling in convoy and by comparing with the 20th‐Century Reanalysis. This dataset provides invaluable instrumental weather observations at times and places during WW2, which fill gaps in existing reconstructions.

Meteorological data rescue: Citizen science lessons learned from Southern Weather Discovery

SummaryDaily weather reconstructions (called “reanalyses”) can help improve our understanding of meteorology and long-term climate changes. Adding undigitized historical weather observations to the datasets that underpin reanalyses is desirable; however, time requirements to capture those data from a range of archives is usually limited. Southern Weather Discovery is a citizen science data rescue project that recovered tabulated handwritten meteorological observations from ship log books and land-based stations spanning New Zealand, the Southern Ocean, and Antarctica. We describe the Zooniverse-hosted Southern Weather Discovery campaign, highlight promotion tactics, and replicate keying levels needed to obtain 100% complete transcribed datasets with minimal type 1 and type 2 transcription errors. Rescued weather observations can augment optical character recognition (OCR) text recognition libraries. Closer links between citizen science data rescue and OCR-based scientific data capture will accelerate weather reconstruction improvements, which can be harnessed to mitigate impacts on communities and infrastructure from weather extremes.

Digitizing, Curating and Visualizing Archival Sources of Maritime History: the case of ship logbooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

A vast area of research in historical science concerns the analysis of historical archival sources. This involves activities such as digitizing the historical sources, usually using spreadsheets or simple relational databases, and then analyzing the transcribed data using a range of methods depending on the kind of data and the type of research question that needs to be answered. In this paper, we describe the process of digitizing, curating and visualizing original archival sources of maritime history, a process done in the context of a European (ERC) project called SeaLiT. In particular, we present a set of innovative tools that have been implemented for supporting historians in transcribing the original sources and curating the transcribed data as well as a web application that visualizes the curated data on an interactive map. The overall process is demonstrated for the case of 16 original ship logbooks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries kept by seven archives in Greece and Spain.

A method to estimate pre‐exploitation population size

Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella) were commercially exploited on the subantarctic island of South Georgia for over 100 years and nearly driven to extinction. Since the cessation of harvesting, however, their populations have rebounded, and they are now often considered a nuisance species whose impact on the terrestrial landscape should be mitigated. Any evaluation of their current population requires the context provided by their historic, pre-exploitation abundance, lest ecologists fall prey to shifting baseline syndrome in which their perspective on current abundance is compared only with an altered state resulting from past anthropogenic disturbance. Estimating pre-exploitation abundance is critical to defining species recovery and setting recovery targets, both of which are needed for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's recent efforts to develop a green list of recovering species. To address this issue, we reconstructed the South Georgia fur seal harvest from 1786 to 1908 from ship logbooks and other historical records and interpolated missing harvest data as necessary with a generalized linear model fit to the historical record. Using an approximate Bayesian computation framework, harvest data, and a stochastic age-structured population model, we estimated the pre-exploitation abundance of Antarctic fur seals on South Georgia was 2.5 million females (95% CI 1.5-3.5 million). This estimate is similar to recent abundance estimates, and suggests current populations, and the ecological consequences of so many fur seals on the island, may be similar to conditions prior to human harvest. Although the historic archive on the fur sealing era is unavoidably patchy, the use of archival records is essential for reconstructing the past and, correspondingly, to understanding the present. Article impact statement: Defining species recovery requires an understanding of baseline population state, which can be estimated through statistical methods.

A historical Southern Ocean climate dataset from whaling ships’ logbooks

AbstractHistorical ship logbooks provide vital historic meteorological observations in the Southern Ocean, one of the largest climate‐data deficient regions on the Earth. Christian Salvesen Whaling Company logbooks from whaling ships operating in the Southern Ocean, starting from the 1930s through the 1950s, are examined. Meteorological information contained in these logbooks has been extracted to produce a historical climate dataset. We discuss various instructions recommended by the British Admiralty to observe and record weather conditions on‐board whaling ships. Statistical tests were used to flag erroneous values and corrections were made using neighbouring values. Meteorological parameters such as air pressure, air and sea temperature and wind force on the Beaufort scale were standardized, converting imperial to metric units. The data were structured according to the internationally accepted International Maritime Meteorological Archive format, which includes the most commonly reported meteorological variables, including the time, location and ship‐related meta‐data. Hence, a readily accessible, error‐corrected and standardized historical climate dataset of the Weddell Sea sector of the Southern Ocean is presented.Open Practices This article has earned an Open Data badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.31530. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

Estimating the extent of Antarctic summer sea ice during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration

Abstract. In stark contrast to the sharp decline in Arctic sea ice, there has been a steady increase in ice extent around Antarctica during the last three decades, especially in the Weddell and Ross seas. In general, climate models do not to capture this trend and a lack of information about sea ice coverage in the pre-satellite period limits our ability to quantify the sensitivity of sea ice to climate change and robustly validate climate models. However, evidence of the presence and nature of sea ice was often recorded during early Antarctic exploration, though these sources have not previously been explored or exploited until now. We have analysed observations of the summer sea ice edge from the ship logbooks of explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and their contemporaries during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (1897–1917), and in this study we compare these to satellite observations from the period 1989–2014, offering insight into the ice conditions of this period, from direct observations, for the first time. This comparison shows that the summer sea ice edge was between 1.0 and 1.7° further north in the Weddell Sea during this period but that ice conditions were surprisingly comparable to the present day in other sectors.

Scattered shipwreck site prospection: the combined use of numerical modeling and documentary research (Fougueux, 1805)

A shipwreck site located off Sancti Petri sand spit (Cadiz, Spain) was identified as a Temeraire-class 74-gun French ship. The archaeological deposits relate it to the Fougueux, sunken after the Battle of Trafalgar. The site contains some pieces of the naval structure, 32 iron guns, and a large anchor, but two thirds of the ship is missing. Available information (including ship logbooks of weather observations and other historic documents) establishes that a dismasted French ship ran aground on 22 October 1805 and broke up into pieces on the 25th due to tempestuous weather. Combining that information and a set of numerical models (ocean, atmosphere, and dispersion), we aim to simulate different scenarios in order to determine the most probable areas for finding the shipwreck remains of the Fougueux, taking into account the uncertainty of the information used and the modeling limitations. The probability of finding scattered remains belonging to the Fougueux was calculated using the modeled scenarios. As a result, it was found that the high probability area contained four additional sites comprising 40 guns and 5 anchors whose characteristics and dating are similar to those of the previously known site. The results of our study highlight the value of numerical modeling in underwater archaeology as a tool for the identification and optimization of resources in prospecting scattered shipwreck sites.

'Never such weather known in these seas': Climatic Fluctuations and the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century, 1652-1674

Abstract In the North Sea region, the so-called Little Ice Age reached a cold, stormy nadir between 1560 and 1720, with a three-decade interruption of warmer, more tranquil weather between 1629 and 1662. Newly considered ship logbooks, diaries and other documentary evidence suggest that a rise in the frequency of easterly winds accompanied the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age, and these decadal climatic trends had consequences for regional warfare. Fought between 1652 and 1674, the Anglo-Dutch wars at sea were contested in a period of transition between decade-scale climatic regimes and consequently provide useful case studies into the relationship between meteorological trends and early modern military operations. In the first war, persistent westerly winds born of a warmer climate frequently helped crews aboard larger English warships set the terms of most naval engagements. However, during the second and third wars more frequent easterlies stimulated by a cooler climate granted critical advantages to Dutch fleets that had adopted elements of English tactics and technology. Ultimately, the changing climate of the Little Ice Age must be considered alongside human agency and the political, economic or cultural influences typically examined by military historians to explain the course of early modern warfare.

A review of uncertainty in in situ measurements and data sets of sea surface temperature

Archives of in situ sea surface temperature (SST) measurements extend back more than 160 years. Quality of the measurements is variable, and the area of the oceans they sample is limited, especially early in the record and during the two world wars. Measurements of SST and the gridded data sets that are based on them are used in many applications so understanding and estimating the uncertainties are vital. The aim of this review is to give an overview of the various components that contribute to the overall uncertainty of SST measurements made in situ and of the data sets that are derived from them. In doing so, it also aims to identify current gaps in understanding. Uncertainties arise at the level of individual measurements with both systematic and random effects and, although these have been extensively studied, refinement of the error models continues. Recent improvements have been made in the understanding of the pervasive systematic errors that affect the assessment of long-term trends and variability. However, the adjustments applied to minimize these systematic errors are uncertain and these uncertainties are higher before the 1970s and particularly large in the period surrounding the Second World War owing to a lack of reliable metadata. The uncertainties associated with the choice of statistical methods used to create globally complete SST data sets have been explored using different analysis techniques, but they do not incorporate the latest understanding of measurement errors, and they want for a fair benchmark against which their skill can be objectively assessed. These problems can be addressed by the creation of new end-to-end SST analyses and by the recovery and digitization of data and metadata from ship log books and other contemporary literature.

The Influence of Different Types of Marine Fuel over the Energy Efficiency Operational Index

One of the main concerns of our society is certainly environmental protection. The international efforts for maintaining a clean environment are various and this paper refers to the efforts in the maritime transport field. The subject of our study is the concept of Energy Efficiency Operational Index (EEOI), developed to provide ship-owners with assistance in the process of establishing the emissions from ships in operation, and to suggest the methods for achieving their reduction. As a monitoring tool, EEOI represents the mass of CO2 emitted per unit of transport work. Using the software developed by the authors, it will emphasize the variation of the EEOI value for one vessel using different types of fuel during the laden and ballast voyages, for a period of three months, as stated in the Ship's Log Books. The main consumers considered are Main Engine, Diesel Generators and steam Boilers, and the types of fuel used will be as per charter party agreements and following the specific international and local rules and regulations. The results for the quality parameter EEOI and the average cost of achieving them will be included in compared cost-to-quality graphs, in order to underline the profitability of the studied methods for minimizing the air emissions.

Identifying New Zealand, Southeast Australia, and Southwest Pacific historical weather data sources using Ian Nicholson'sLog of Logs

Historical meteorological data are essential for increasing the level of understanding about past, present, and future climates. In the Northern Hemisphere, a significant amount of research has been dedicated to rescuing climate data from historical sources such as ship logbooks (e.g. RECLAIM, CLIWOC, and ICOADS). However, limited research in this field has focused on New Zealand, Southeast Australia, and the Southwest Pacific. Because these regions were colonized recently by Europeans (~200 years ago), only 50–100 years of land-based meteorological data exist for many locations. However, meteorological information contained in ship logbooks may extend and reinforce the existing historical climate record for these regions. The Log of Logs is a catalogue of ships that visited Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding waters in the th and 20th centuries of the Common Era. These volumes provide a record of the location of ship logbooks. This study extracted information from the Log of Logs for New Zealand, Southeast Australia, and the Southwest Pacific for 1786–1900. The purpose of this was to locate ship logbooks that may contain meteorological data. The next stage of this project is to gather, image, digitize, and to analyse the data from the prioritized logbooks. These data have application for local climate reconstruction, extension of regional circulation indices, and augmentation of the extended reanalysis without radiosondes effort.

Hudson's Bay Company ship's logbooks: a source of far North Atlantic weather data

ABSTRACTThe Arctic region is widely recognised to be one of the most sensitive to climate change. Here, the consequences of current trends will be felt most keenly; ice cap melting and thinning and the consequent implications for sea level rise and loss of habitat may be profound. Yet these regions remain amongst the most poorly chronicled. Recent advances in satellite monitoring and instrumental observations now provide valuable information, but this record extends over little more than half a century. For earlier times, the record is, at best, patchy and inconsistent. This is not, however, to imply that all such data and information have been recognised and fully exploited. This is far from the case and this paper draws attention to largely overlooked documentary sources that can extend our knowledge of the far North Atlantic climate back to the late eighteenth century. These documents consist of the logbooks of sailing ships navigating those hazardous waters in the late eighteenth and early- to mid-nineteenth centuries.This paper focuses specifically on those logbooks kept on board Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) ships on their regular annual voyages between the UK and Hudson's Bay between 1760 and 1870. The information they contain is shown to be detailed, reliable and of unique character for the period and place. The style and form of presentation of the logbooks is reviewed and particularly those aspects that deal with the daily meteorological information they contain. Attention is also drawn to the high degree of homogeneity found in the logbooks in terms of presentation and methods of preparation, rendering them directly and helpfully comparable one with another. A specific example is offered of the benefits of using these data and it is proposed that this set of logbooks, when taken collectively and, embracing as it does over a century from 1750 provides a matchless, substantial and uniformly reliable source of oceanic weather information for the far North Atlantic for what can be regarded as the ‘pre-instrumental’ period (before 1850).

The Great Louisiana Hurricane of August 1812

Major hurricanes are prominent meteorological hazards of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. However, the official modern record of Atlantic basin tropical cyclones starts at 1851, and it does not provide a comprehensive measure of the frequency and magnitude of major hurricanes. Vast amounts of documentary weather data extend back several centuries, but many of these have not yet been fully utilized for hurricane reconstruction. These sources include weather diaries, ship logbooks, ship protests, and newspapers from American, British, and Spanish archives. A coordinated effort, utilizing these historical sources, has reconstructed a major hurricane in August 1812, which is the closest to ever pass by New Orleans, Louisiana, including Hurricane Katrina. The storm became a tropical depression in the Caribbean Sea, passed south of Jamaica as a tropical storm, and then strengthened to hurricane strength in the Gulf of Mexico. It made landfall about 65 km southeast of New Orleans and passed just to the west of...

The importance of ship log data: reconstructing North Atlantic, European and Mediterranean sea level pressure fields back to 1750

Local to regional climate anomalies are to a large extent determined by the state of the atmospheric circulation. The knowledge of large-scale sea level pressure (SLP) variations in former times is therefore crucial when addressing past climate changes across Europe and the Mediterranean. However, currently available SLP reconstructions lack data from the ocean, particularly in the pre-1850 period. Here we present a new statistically-derived 5° × 5° resolved gridded seasonal SLP dataset covering the eastern North Atlantic, Europe and the Mediterranean area (40°W–50°E; 20°N–70°N) back to 1750 using terrestrial instrumental pressure series and marine wind information from ship logbooks. For the period 1750–1850, the new SLP reconstruction provides a more accurate representation of the strength of the winter westerlies as well as the location and variability of the Azores High than currently available multiproxy pressure field reconstructions. These findings strongly support the potential of ship logbooks as an important source to determine past circulation variations especially for the pre-1850 period. This new dataset can be further used for dynamical studies relating large-scale atmospheric circulation to temperature and precipitation variability over the Mediterranean and Eurasia, for the comparison with outputs from GCMs as well as for detection and attribution studies.

The New England Cod Fishing Industry and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution

THE NEW ENGLAND COD FISHING INDUSTRY AND MARITIME DIMENSIONS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONChristopher Paul Magra, PhDUniversity of Pittsburgh, 2006 The American Revolution cannot be fully understood without coming to terms with why workers and merchants within the New England cod fishing industry resisted British authority and how their labor and capital contributed to the war effort. The Revolution began in New England with the shot heard around the world in Concord, Massachusetts. New England provided the most manpower for the American military each and every year of the war. And cod represented the most lucrative trade good in all of colonial New England. Between 1768 and 1772, fish represented 35% of New England's total export revenue. The second most valuable export commodity, livestock, represented only 20% of this revenue stream. By 1775, an estimated 10,000 New Englanders, or 8% of the adult male working population, labored in the fishing industry. Yet, to date there has not been a systematic effort to investigate the relationship between this vital colonial industry and the Revolutionary War. In order to get at the linkages between the worlds of commerce and the way of war I triangulated data culled from merchant ledgers, ship's log books, customs records, shipping records, diaries, newspapers, and military service records. Drawing on these sources, the dissertation defends a two-fold argument. First, economic competition between vested interests in the British Empire, principally New England fish merchants, West Country fish merchants, and West Indian sugar planters, resulted in a series of commercial regulations and naval police actions aimed at restricting New England's economic expansion. These regulations and actions culminated in the British state's fateful decision in 1775 to close the New England cod fishing industry, which ultimately motivated colonists to go to war. Second, fishermen and fish merchants played key roles in winning the war. Merchants converted trade routes into military supply lines and transformed their fishing vessels into warships. Fishermen armed and manned the first American navy, served in the first coast guard units, manned privateers, and fought on land. These multi-faceted efforts helped secure American independence.

Nordic ice edge data

The NOAA program at the National Snow and Ice Data Center has released a data set of “March through August Ice Edge Positions in the Nordic Seas, 1750–2002.” “Ice edge” is defined as the outer boundary of ice having at least 30% ice concentration; the ice edge positions come from ship logbooks, diaries, satellite data products, and other sources. The data set provides information about ice edge variability through regional shifts in climate. The data set is available at http://nsidc.org/data/g02169.html.

The Case of Earth's Incredible Shrinking Field

This paper describes how the Earth's magnetic field has been monitored by the use of hidden data in ship logbooks that navigated the planet's ocean during the 16th, 17th and 18th century. The results allowed building a remarkable picture of the earth's magnetic field behavior in the centuries before detailed measurements were possible. It turns out that measurements of the direction of the field relative to the position of the sun were common between 1590 and 1840. By combining these data with the paleointensity measurements to calculate that Earth's field was probably stable prior to 1840, or at least decaying at a much slower rate than it is now

Ship logbooks help analyze pre‐instrumental climate

The Climatological Database for the World's Oceans: 1750–1854 (CLIWOC) project, which concluded in 2004, abstracted more than 280,000 daily weather observations from ships logbooks from British, Dutch, French, and Spanish naval vessels engaged in imperial business in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.These data, now compiled into a database, provide valuable information for the reconstruction of oceanic wind field patterns for this key period that precedes the time in which anthropogenic influences on climate became evident. These reconstructions, in turn, provide evidence for such phenomena as the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Of equal importance is the finding that the CLIWOC database—the first coordinated attempt to harness the scientific potential of this resource [Garcia‐Herrera et al., 2005]—represents less than 10 percent of the volume of data currently known to reside in this important but hitherto neglected source.

The Non-Climatic Research Potential of Ships' Logbooks and Journals

The large-scale study of ship's logbooks for climatic data has revealed the wide and varied potential of this under-exploited resource for the study of the past. As well as being of utility to climatologists, the daily recording of shipboard information can help illuminate a number of themes of interest to maritime and naval historians. More than this, however, such studies can help inform both more general and other specialized historical studies. Logbooks contain both anecdotal and statistical data relevant to the studies of medical historians, the history of science and navigation, social history, economic history, warfare, imperial history and of course environmental history. Moreover, many of these themes can be studied in a multi-national context and furthermore, if studied in a multi-disciplinary context, can offer many useful insights.