* Volunteers sought to transcribe logs from 1850 to World
War Two
* Ship logs to fill gap between ancient, modern data
WASHINGTON, Oct 24 (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)
