Reuters: Science News: U.S. looks to old Arctic ship logs for climate change clues

Reuters: Science News Reuters.com is your source for breaking news, business, financial and investing news, including personal finance and stocks. Reuters is the leading global provider of news, financial information and technology solutions to the world's media, financial institutions, businesses and individuals. // via fulltextrssfeed.com

U.S. looks to old Arctic ship logs for climate change clues Oct 26th 2012, 20:40 Scientists Jens Ehn (L) and Christie Wood scoop water from melt ponds on sea ice in the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic Ocean in this July 10, 2011 NASA handout photo obtained by Reuters June 10, 2012. Credit: Reuters/Kathryn Hansen/NASA By Ian Simpson WASHINGTON | Fri Oct 26, 2012 4:40pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A project to help track Arctic climate change using volunteers to transcribe U.S. ship logs online was launched on Wednesday by the National Archives and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Using citizen scientists to transcribe thousands of pages of logbooks from Navy, Coast Guard and other ships from 1850 to World War Two will fill a big data gap, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said. Scientists in recent decades have gotten weather data from satellites and ground observations, and such tools as ice samples show ancient patterns, she said. But the archived logs could establish a baseline of historical weather data. "Naval and Coast Guard records are an invaluable window into the past which will let us know what it was like then," she told Reuters after a news conference. NOAA scientists have said that the Arctic is undergoing dramatic change as world temperatures climb. Arctic sea ice shrank to a record low of 1.32 million square miles (3.41 million square kilometers) by mid-September. Project organizers, which include science web portal Zooniverse, hope to enlist thousands of volunteers to transcribe scanned pages from logbooks. The pages will be loaded onto Old Weather, an online weather data project (www.oldweather.org). Information also could be used by scientists in other fields, as well as historians and genealogists, organizers said. Navy logs carried weather observations 24 times a day. Mark Mollan, a reference archivist and a project organizer, said the National Archives had 1,000 boxes of Arctic ship logs. Each page put online will be transcribed three times to eliminate errors, he said. In the first Old Weather project, started in 2010, 16,400 volunteers have transcribed 1.6 million weather observations from British Navy ship logs. Four bulky logbooks, all with Arctic observations in neat 19th century handwriting, were displayed at the news conference. The logs included one from the doomed 1879 Arctic voyage of the Jeannette, a U.S. Navy ship that sank after being trapped in ice off Russia. The commander starved to death and 18 other expedition members died. (Reporting by Ian Simpson; editing by Philip Barbara) Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions