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

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.