Science News
Germany to digitize 19th-century sailing-ship weather logs
By DPA
Nov 12, 2007, 15:31 GMT

Berlin - Germany's federal meteorologists are to digitize a unique collection of weather logs from German sailing ships and steamboats cruising the world's oceans in the 19th and 20th centuries, an official said Monday.

The data is valuable as it will help long-term weather forecasting and studies of global warming.

The German weather service DWD plans to scan electronically more than 37,000 logbooks in its Hamburg library as a first step to digitizing the data on wind, temperature and storms on the seven seas since the first half of the 19th century.

Transcribing the logs from these images will require special training in reading old handwriting, said Wilfried Thommes, a member of the DWD board. He said deterioration of the paper they are written on meant the project had to move ahead.

'Climate studies are dependent on this data,' he said. Germany still continuously collects worldwide climate data from about 800 merchant ships which send in weather reports by wireless.