What do you think of my new boat? You have to admit it is pretty nice. It is the HMS Laconia a former passenger liner turned armed merchantmen built in the early 1900’s.

It’s a little big to launch a lake for bass fishing and it probably doesn’t have a live well for the fish we’d catch anyway. HMS Laconia is a little pretentious for a fishing boat anyway.

It does have a Dining Saloon however. I don’t know if chicken fried steak is on the menu or not.

It doesn’t matter because it was sunk by the German submarine, U 50, pictured below six miles off Fastnet, which I think is an island just of the southern Irish coast on 25 February 1917.

Oh well, it would have been fun.

Why am I calling this boat mine? I found the coolest thing on the internet, second only to geocaching. It is called OldWeather.Org. It is a citizen science project to transcribe the old log books from all sorts of British Ships from the early part of the century and you can browse this site to know more about it. The books were written by hand in handwriting that is almost as bad as mine so they cannot just  scan them into the computer. They need people to transcribe them.

It’s easy and fun and doesn’t cost anything. They give you templates and instructions on where to enter the date and the location of the ship as wells as water, air, and dew point temperatures, wind speed, and direction, and sea state. Plus you can read the log pages as your ship goes into and out of ports and loads and unloads stuff. It really is fascinating. When they started the project they had a total of 750,000 log pages they need transcribed.  They also have other links involving citizen science if you want to do something else.

What is this data used for? It is for climate research to help calibrate and validate the weather models being developed today to help scientists determine just what affects are climate and how much. They didn’t have the network of weather stations back then with weather satellites. Plus Al Gore hadn’t been born yet and so they didn’t have the internet, that he built, to link all the data together. (Yeah I know, he never claimed that he built the internet.)
Go to OldWeather.Org to see how to get started.

Below is a video from their tutorial section to show how to get started.

Old Weather – Getting Started from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.

So what do you think? Give it a go. Don’t tell me you don’t have the time. You wouldn’t be reading this if you were busy.