Digitizing observations from the Met Office Daily Weather Reports for 1900–1910 using citizen scientist volunteers

Abstract

In September 1860, the UK Met Office (then known as the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade), under the direction of Admiral Robert FitzRoy, began publishing Daily Weather Reports (DWRs) which consisted of tabulated weather observations from stations around Great Britain and Ireland (GBI). These stations communicated the observations daily to the Met Office in London by telegraph (Lempfert, 1913; Walker, 2011). Fitzroy used these observations to provide storm warnings and the first ever public 'weather forecasts', starting in August 1861. The observations from the DWRs have yet to be digitized so do not currently exist in any databases, although similar data from a small number of stations have been digitized from other sources. The DWRs are handwritten which makes them more difficult to digitize with optical character recognition (OCR) than typeset documents (Brönnimann et al., 2006) so must be digitized manually. Any attempts to digitize large quantities of handwritten weather observations are extremely

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

“…This echoes findings learned from citizen science efforts to key United Kingdom Met Office daily weather reports, where it was noted that the effort required to clip segments of images and provide them using consistent formatting for end-user context places an additional time burden on the research team. 55 Automated clipping routines we tested reduced the time investment for this specific data rescue step, but success is highly dependent on the quality of photography and the types of scientific data tables being rescued. We are aware that the efforts from ACRE Argentina at present are using clipping approaches that focus on single cells and providing them in Zooniverse without formatting, which is a potential time-saving measure ( https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/acre-ar/meteororum-ad-extremum-terrae ).…”

Millions of historical monthly rainfall observations taken in the UK and Ireland rescued by citizen scientists

“…org; SouthernWeatherDiscovery.org; Climate History Australia). The WeatherRescue.org project is described in Hawkins et al (2019) and Craig and Hawkins (2020). Other online citizen science projects have been highly successful, such as the DRAW project (Sieber & Slonosky, 2019).…”

Meteorological Data Rescue – Citizen Science Lessons Learned From Southern Weather Discovery

“…This echoes findings learned from citizen science efforts to key United Kingdom Met Office daily weather reports, where it was noted that the effort required to clip segments of images and provide them using consistent formatting for end-user context places an additional time burden on the research team. 55 Automated clipping routines we tested reduced the time investment for this specific data rescue step, but success is highly dependent on the quality of photography and the types of scientific data tables being rescued. We are aware that the efforts from ACRE Argentina at present are using clipping approaches that focus on single cells and providing them in Zooniverse without formatting, which is a potential time-saving measure (https:// www.zooniverse.org/projects/acre-ar/meteororum-ad-extremumterrae).…”