Our knowledge of the dwindling sea ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean comes mostly through satellites, which since 1979 have imaged the sea ice from above. The 91Ě˝»¨’s Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean and Modeling System, or , is a leading tool for gauging the thickness of that ice. Until now that system has gone back only as far as 1979.

A now extends the estimate of Arctic sea ice volume back more than a century, to 1901. To do so it used both modern-day computer simulations and historic observations, some written by hand in the early 1900s aboard precursors to today’s U.S. Coast Guard ships.

“This extends the record of sea ice thickness variability from 40 years to 110 years, which allows us to put more recent variability and ice loss in perspective,” said , a sea ice scientist at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory and first author of the study published in the August issue of the Journal of Climate.

“The volume of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean today and the current rate of loss are unprecedented in the 110-year record,” he added.

PIOMAS provides a daily reconstruction of what’s happening to the total volume of sea ice across the Arctic Ocean. It combines weather records and satellite images of ice coverage to compute ice volume. It then verifies its results against any existing thickness observations. For years after 1950, that might be fixed instruments, direct measurements or submarines that cruise below the ice.

During the early 20^th century, the rare direct observations of sea ice were done by U.S. Revenue cutters, the precursor to the Coast Guard, and Navy ships that have cruised through the Arctic each year since 1879. In the project, the UW, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Archives have been working with citizen scientists to to recover unique climate records for science. The new study is the first to use the logbooks’ observations of sea ice.

“In the logbooks, officers always describe the operating conditions that they were in, providing hourly observations of the sea ice at that time and place,” said co-author , a researcher at the . If the ship was in open water, the logbook might read “steaming full ahead” or “underway.” When the ship encountered ice, officers might write “steering various courses and speeds” meaning the ship was sailing through a field of ice floes. When they found themselves trapped in the ice pack, the log might read “beset.”

These logbooks until recently could only be viewed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., but through digital imaging and transcription by Old Weather citizen-scientists these rare observations of weather and sea ice conditions in the Arctic in the late 1800s and early 1900s have been made available to scientists and the public.

“These are unique historic observations that can help us to understand the rapid changes that are taking place in the Arctic today,” Wood said.

Wood leads the U.S. portion of the Old Weather project, which originated in 2010 in the U.K. The weather observations from historic logbooks transcribed by Old Weather citizen scientists have already been added to international databases of climate data and were used in the model of the atmosphere that produced the new results.

Officers recorded the ship’s position at noon each day using a sextant. They would also note when they passed recognizable features, allowing researchers today to fully reconstruct the ship’s route to locate it in space and time.

While the historic sea ice observations have not yet been incorporated directly into the ice model, spot checks between the model and the early observations confirm the validity of the tool.

“This is independent verification that the model is doing the right thing,” Schweiger said.

The new, longer record provides more context for big storms or other unusual events and a new way to study the Arctic Ocean sea ice system.

“The observations that we have for sea ice thickness and variability are so limited,” Schweiger said. “I think people will start analyzing this record. There’s a host of questions that people can ask to help understand Arctic sea ice and predict is future.”

The PIOMAS tool is widely used by scientists to monitor the of Arctic sea ice. The area of Arctic sea ice over the month of June 2019, and the PIOMAS-calculated volume, were the second-lowest for that time of year since the satellite record began.

The lowest-ever recorded Arctic sea ice area and volume occurred in September 2012. And while Schweiger believes the long-term trend will be downward, he’s not placing bets on this year setting a new record.

“The state of the sea ice right now is set up for new lows, but whether it will happen or not depends on the weather over the next two months,” Schweiger said.

The other co-author is at the 91Ě˝»¨Applied Physics Laboratory. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the North Pacific Research Board.

For more information, contact Schweiger at schweig@uw.edu or 206-543-1312 and Wood at krwood@uw.edu 206-526-6862.

The new $482,018 grant to the UW, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the National Archives Foundation will support “Seas of Knowledge: Digitization and Retrospective Analysis of the Historical Logbooks of the United States Navy.” This will allow the project to digitize the logbooks, muster rolls and related materials from U.S. naval vessels, focusing on the period from 1861 to 1879.

“Very few of the marine weather observations diligently recorded by Navy officers since the early 1800s have been digitized and made accessible for modern climate and weather research,” said principal investigator , of the , a research center operated by the 91Ě˝»¨and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The Civil War- and Reconstruction-era logs we are targeting here are particularly useful to fill in and extend our knowledge of past weather conditions around the world, from the mid-19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.”

Wood is one of the leaders of the Old Weather project, in 2010, that has transcribed weather records from the British Royal Navy and later the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and Coast Survey ships that had sailed Arctic waters. A 2015 addition began to digitize the that are now at the .

After making digital images of the logbooks housed at the National Archives, the project will recover ships’ positions, weather records, oceanographic data and other historical information through the citizen-science program that trains volunteers to transcribe the logs’ handwritten entries. So far volunteers have transcribed more than 3 million new-to-science weather records, and more than 1 million of those have been quality-checked and added into global climate databases.

This historic weather and climate data helps scientists better understand modern climate change patterns and improve prediction. The new effort seeks to fill a gap in the data of past weather and ocean conditions.

“A key point about the U.S. Civil War is that it put a stop to [Naval officer] ‘s pioneering collection of marine weather observations. If you look at the number and coverage of the marine observations we currently have available, you can see a dramatic dropoff in 1861. Coverage didn’t get back to pre-war standards until about 1880,” said collaborator , a climate scientist at the U.K.’s national weather office and Old Weather science team leader. “This project will go some way to repairing the damage. And it’s a credit to the National Archives that such a repair is still possible, even 150 years later.”

The project will also digitize the National Archives’ related collection of muster rolls that shows the names of all the enlisted sailors on board. When combined with logbooks that list the names of officers, this will provide historians and family researchers an online database of unprecedented detail and a window into day-to-day life during this period in history, Wood said. The grant also will support an educational effort that will allow the public to explore the information uncovered in the ships’ logbooks through an interactive exhibit.

Other investigators on the project are at the National Archives and Records Administration, at the National Archives Foundation and, at the University of Colorado.

This is the third group of projects to win a award, which is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program supports the creation of digital representations of unique content of high scholarly significance that will be discoverable and usable as elements of a coherent, national collection.

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For more information, contact Wood at krwood@uw.edu.

But what was the Arctic like before — when maritime explorers and whale hunters first ventured into its icy seas? If scientists could know more about Arctic climate of the past, they could better understand today’s changes, and use that knowledge to improve projections for the future.

is a citizen-science project led by a 91Ě˝»¨ scientist and former mariner that is mining historic ships logs to get a unique peek at Arctic climate over the past two centuries.

An update launched Dec. 3 expands the project to also include hundreds of , whose logbooks were preserved and scanned into digital form from New England museums and libraries.

Until now, Old Weather has mined logbooks from historic federal ships’ logs, scanned in recent years at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The whaling ships will add a new source of data for conditions in Arctic Ocean waters.

“The whaling ships provide a rich resource for us to use for the region north of Bering Strait,” said project leader , a research scientist at the , a partnership between the 91Ě˝»¨and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “In some years there may have been 40 or 50 ships working in that sector of the Arctic.”

The commercial whaling boats recorded sea ice and weather data in more than 400 logbooks from voyages dating as far back as the 1840s, with most taking place from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s.

“They’re not doing the hourly instrumental weather that the federal ships did, but they talk about sea ice in a very thorough way,” Wood said. “We can get more than one ship at a time in one area. This will allow us to get a much better characterization of the sea ice and other environmental conditions, especially in the Pacific Arctic.”

Institutions that contributed logbooks include the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Providence Public Library, the Nantucket Historical Association, Martha’s Vineyard Museum, Mystic Seaport and the New Bedford Free Public Library. Together these institutions hold the majority of U.S. Arctic whaling logbooks still in existence, Wood said.

The data that Old Weather volunteer citizen scientists meticulously transcribe from the logbooks are used to drive climate and sea ice models to help understand changes and improve predictions.

Volunteers get to help solve a climate puzzle from far back before the satellite era. They also get to experience the firsthand accounts of the whalers as they pursued their quarry into perilous Arctic seas.

“These stories will provide the best historical documentation of the Arctic marine environment over the past two centuries that it is possible to assemble,” Wood said.

Including the new logbooks, the Old Weather effort has scanned more than 500,000 handwritten pages from historic ship logs, and Old Weather volunteers have so far transcribed almost 3 million historical weather records for use in climate and environmental research.

Learn more, or volunteer to transcribe, at .

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For more information, contact Wood at 206-526-6862 or krwood@uw.edu.

Changes in the Arctic climate are bringing new interest in those historic explorers’ observations. A volunteer effort launched last fall, headed by 91Ě˝»¨ climate scientist with the support of the National Archives, enlists the help of citizen-scientists to examine digitized scans of the log entries and transcribe the information.

While the handwriting is too difficult for computers to decipher, human volunteers can extract the meaning from the decades-old pen strokes to add them to the climate record.

This month, for example, volunteers transcribing pages from their home computers completed the logbooks from the doomed expedition, which left San Francisco in the summer of 1879 bound for the North Pole. The ship soon became trapped in thick ice and drifted for almost two years, during which time the 33-member crew maintained the boat, hunted seals and polar bears – and recorded hourly scientific observations.

The observations help to reveal past weather and climate.

“When we see events like Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina and the recent melt in the Beaufort Sea, people want to know: Has this ever happened before? And that turns out to be a hard question to answer,” Wood said.

Before arriving at the 91Ě˝»¨in 2004, Wood worked for 25 years as a merchant mariner, so he has firsthand knowledge of maritime weather observations. He also has a longtime interest in studying the Arctic as a climate scientist at the , a research center that is a partnership between the 91Ě˝»¨and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In 2010, Wood attended a scientific meeting and met , a climate scientist at the U.K.’s national weather office who had just launched the project to transcribe World War I-era Royal Navy logbooks. The two discussed extending it to the U.S. fleet.

Wood approached the National Archives, and an interagency collaboration to allow NOAA access to the logs was established in 2011. launched last October.

Two interns now work at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., taking archival-quality digital images of each page. So far, the team has photographed more than 275,000 pages containing some 23 million new oceanic, atmospheric and sea-ice observations. The team is ready to add more than 20 ships to the . Wood expects that all of the logbooks from 60-some Navy, Coast Guard and Coast Survey ships that traveled to the Arctic before 1950 will be scanned by the end of this year.

Transcriptions are under way thanks to more than 16,000 active Old Weather volunteers, mainly science and history buffs from the U.S., the U.K. and other countries. Volunteers first create an account with Zooniverse, a site that hosts citizen-science projects, and then select Old Weather. A tutorial explains where to find the weather and other information and how to enter it into the database. Volunteers begin as cadets, and then move up through the ranks to lieutenant and captain as they complete transcriptions.

The site’s community forums are active, Wood said. When volunteers discover an unusual incident – say, somebody trying to jump ship through a porthole – they head to the forum to compare notes to find out where that person eventually ended up.

“A lot of people are motivated by being able to see the history unfolding in real time,” Wood said. And there are other surprises – the interns recently collected on Whidbey Island, Wash., wedged between the pages of an 1891 entry.

Wood and Brohan will analyze the weather observations in completed transcriptions, focusing on the period between 1854 and 1950.

The climate data comes when it’s badly needed, and when it can be particularly useful to scientists. Just five years ago, Wood said, researchers relied on gridded weather observations, so a few new data points gleaned from ship records would be nice, but only a drop in the bucket. Now, sophisticated computer programs can use observations to reconstruct the whole Earth’s atmosphere, and even sparse data points can recreate the weather for an entire region.

Wood is also collaborating with polar scientists at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory to add historic sea-ice observations that will help to extend their Arctic sea ice model back into the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Wood notes that the U.S.S. Jeannette became encased in 20-foot-thick sea ice in water that is now ice-free in summer.

“I think these logbooks may change people’s perspective on just how dramatic the current melt back is,” he said.

As with other citizen-science projects, volunteers will be credited on publications. The data is also being added to the for use by scientists worldwide.

The crowdsourced transcriptions are the biggest component of the , a broader investigation led by Wood into historic records of Arctic sea ice and climate.

Related projects include:

• A 91Ě˝»¨Information School Master’s student who last summer created a from Seattle’s .
• New York high school students looking to see whether housings used around thermometers in the past could have skewed the temperature measurements (so far, luckily, it looks like they don’t).
• An upcoming project that will hire students to turn sea-ice descriptions transcribed by Old Weather volunteers into data points.

Ships that spent time in the Arctic represent less than one-third of the National Archives’ collection of more than a quarter-million logbooks, which Wood hopes will someday be fully transcribed. A recent collaboration with the New Bedford Whaling Museum will add whaling logbooks to the Old Weather project.

“I think the U.S. has the largest reservoir of marine meteorological data in the world,” Wood said. “This is an opportunity for people to contribute, in a meaningful way, to understanding the global climate.”

Old Weather-Arctic is funded by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce through the and by the National Science Foundation.

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For more information, contact Wood at 206-526-6862 or krwood@uw.edu.