Researchers at the ICARUS climate research center at Ireland’s Maynooth University (MU) have launched a new citizen science project that seeks to rescue historical African weather data that the institution says is vital for research about a continent that is vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
The Weather Archive Africa project is seeking volunteers to sift through four million images of historical weather data from 43 African countries to determine which images are usable for their research.
The images come from the African Centre of Meteorological Application for Development (ACMAD) collection. They were transferred to fiche and film by ACMAD, the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium and the World Meteorological Organization in the late 1980s/early 1990s and were subsequently converted to electronic images by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
However, the images are of variable quality, and it is unclear where and when the data was obtained.
“Before we can transcribe the data, we need to separate the images that are readable from those that are unreadable,” said ICARUS researcher Kevin Healion, who is involved in the project.
“We also need to make sure that the station name, month and year of observation are recorded otherwise rescuing the data will be all but impossible. Once we know which images are usable and where and when they were taken, we can start the process of rescue.”
Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), welcomed the initiative: “We warmly welcome this project to transcribe historical climate records from across Africa. Supported by C3S in collaboration with ACMAD and the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, under the auspices of WMO, this citizen-science initiative will enrich observation databases for next-generation climate reanalyses and shed new light on how the continent’s climate has evolved since the early 20th century.”
Those wishing to volunteer to help classify the data can find out more here.
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