Digitizing weather observations from World War II US naval ship logbooks

• Published in: Geoscience data journal 2024-07, Vol.11 (3), p.314-329
• Main Authors: Teleti, Praveen, Hawkins, Ed, Wood, Kevin R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Air temperature; Aircraft carriers; Atmospheric pressure; Battleships; climate; Climate change; data rescue; Datasets; Defence craft; Digitization; Digitizing; Government archives; Image quality; Logbooks; Measurement techniques; Metadata; Naval vessels; Oceans; Quality control; Sea surface temperature; ship observations; Ships; Surface temperature; War; Weather; Wind direction; Wind measurement; Wind speed; World War II; WW2
• ISSN: 2049-6060; 2049-6060
• DOI: 10.1002/gdj3.222

The 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. World War II is a significant event in the history of the world, with disruption to all aspects of life including routine weather observations. We now face the consequences of these observational gaps when trying to reconstruct past climate. US Naval ships observed the weather throughout WW2 and can now provide invaluable observations since their logbooks were declassified. We make millions of weather observations taken onboard US Navy ships available through crowd‐sourcing the transcription process involving thousands of willing volunteers.