THE FUTURE OF THE PLANET

摘要

Crowdsourcing Climate Data The ship's log of whaling vessels-especially those that journeyed to the arctic-can contain valuable data on what the weather was like more than a century ago and the state of arctic ice. For a long time, they were not being mined by climate scientists seeking to understand modern-day climate change, but that's changing. Driven by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Old Weather Whaling project has digitized more than 200 logs from sources including the New Bedford Whaling Museum (NBWM), the Providence Public Library, the National Archives, and other institutions. In concert with the Boston Public Library and the Internet Archive, the records were digitized and brought online. But that alone was not enough to make them truly useful to scientists.