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

Lorrey, A. M., Pearce, P. R., Allan, R., Wilkinson, C., Woolley, J.-M., Judd, E., Mackay, S., Rawhat, S., Slivinski, L., Wilkinson, S., Hawkins, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9477-3677, Quesnel, P. and Compo, G. P. (2022) Meteorological data rescue: citizen science lessons learned from Southern Weather Discovery. Patterns, 3 (6). 100495. ISSN 2666-3899 doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2022.100495

Abstract/Summary

Daily weather reconstructions (called "reanalyses") can help improve our understanding of meteorology and long-term climate changes. Adding undigitized historical weather observations to the datasets that underpin reanalyses is desirable; however, time requirements to capture those data from a range of archives is usually limited. Southern Weather Discovery is a citizen science data rescue project that recovered tabulated handwritten meteorological observations from ship log books and land-based stations spanning New Zealand, the Southern Ocean, and Antarctica. We describe the Zooniverse-hosted Southern Weather Discovery campaign, highlight promotion tactics, and replicate keying levels needed to obtain 100% complete transcribed datasets with minimal type 1 and type 2 transcription errors. Rescued weather observations can augment optical character recognition (OCR) text recognition libraries. Closer links between citizen science data rescue and OCR-based scientific data capture will accelerate weather reconstruction improvements, which can be harnessed to mitigate impacts on communities and infrastructure from weather extremes.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/106159
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.patter.2022.100495
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > NCAS
Uncontrolled Keywords	optical character recognition, data rescue, Zooniverse, meteorology, citizen science, climate, reanalysis
Publisher	Cell Press
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