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| Photo: courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
In September of 1879, the Arctic-exploring USS Jeanette was sailing north of the Bering Strait when it was surrounded by ice floes and frozen in place.
Imprisoned at sea, the 33-person crew struggled to survive for nearly
two years before their ship sank, forcing them to embark on a perilous journey back to civilization.
While they were stranded, the crew took down regular observations of
the weather—winds, clouds, air pressure, temperature—creating a detailed
meteorological record where no others existed.
One hundred and forty years later, that record is now helping scientists reconstruct Earth’s weather and climate history in unprecedented detail.
The USS Jeanette’s logs, which eventually made their way back to the United States along with 13 haggard crewmen led by chief engineer George Melville, were among the very first to be rescued as part of the Old Weather: Arctic project, a citizen science-fueled effort to digitize and transcribe the
weather observations made by U.S. military vessels that sailed the
Arctic in the 19th and 20th centuries... One hundred and forty years later, that record is now helping scientists reconstruct Earth’s weather and climate history in unprecedented detail.
The ‘fog of ignorance’
Today, scientists have myriad satellites and weather stations at
their disposal to study the weather. But satellite record keeping only
began about 40 years ago, and prior to the mid-20th century there were far fewer weather stations. Scientists can use models to “hindcast” the weather further back in
time, but without data to feed into those models, their reconstructions
are murky.
“We call it the fog of ignorance,” says Gilbert Compo, a senior research scientist at NOAA’s CIRES.
“We call it the fog of ignorance,” says Gilbert Compo, a senior research scientist at NOAA’s CIRES.
