Weather reports made by mariners more than two hundred years ago may have relevance for research into climate change today. Some local scientists believe the records from whaling ship logs hold data about shifting winds, storms and tides.
At the Providence Public Library, maritime historian and UMASS Dartmouth professor Timothy Walker, is taking a deep dive into whaling ship logs from the distant past.
“These logbooks hold a lot of information about weather because the whalers were taking daily notes and multiple times a day,” Walker said. “They’re writing down the winds and the temperatures and the wind direction and wind speed and so on. And so we wanted to know if we could extract that weather data to inform climate science. And it turns out that you can.”
Walker says a key component of the recorded observations is that the ships are not following the seaborne highways that merchants and the military would use.
“The whalers are following the whales who go to some of the most remote parts of the world’s oceans. And so, they’re recording weather data in places where we simply don’t have any other way of knowing what the weather was like on a particular day at a particular place, one hundred and fifty, two hundred, two hundred fifty years ago.”
Walker has been working on the project for six years with Caroline Ummenhofer, a climate scientist and oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod.
“We’ve analyzed more than170 logbooks and we have over a hundred thousand daily weather entries, which is amazing”, said Ummenhofer.
“Covering the period 1790 to 1910 with most of the data from the 1840s to sixties, which was the heyday of New England whaling. We can compare that to modern-day observations that we get from satellites or metrological stations.”
“It helps us put recent trends into a long-term context. We have a better sense of how storms and in particular wind patterns that are associated with extreme events, how they have changed in the past, that gives us more confidence into how they are going to change in the future,” Ummenhofer added.
