International Data Bank Forecasting?

This Week UK Climate Change Meeting To Ask Google & Galaxy Zoo For Help

Sept. 6, 2010
Justmeans.com


An exciting gathering of leading climate scientists will meet this week in the UK to finalize plans for a planet changing initiative that will transform their ability to predict world meteorological disasters. They want to create an international databank that would generate forecasts of exceptional precision and we need only think of recent global disasters this year - Russia's blanket of smog; Pakistan's floods and over the weekend New Zealand's earth-quake, that this data would have made a difference to. Scientists believe that as climate change continues to affect the planet, we will need to learn how to predict these potential disasters and will need to take a different approach to tackle this. This is where digital comes in - Google and Galaxy Zoo will play a key part in helping meteorologists to forecast long term weather and climate pattern.

Recent developments on the web will help in the decoding and digitizing of old sea logs from some of Britain's renowned sea voyages. Daily weather information recorded in Britain's navy sea logs during 19th and 20th will reveal climate patterns for these decades. The problem is that the data is stored in old logbooks and it will be a long process to turn this data into a digital format, but this is where Galaxy Zoo and Google will play a role.

Galaxy Zoo is a website set up three years ago by Chris Lintott, an Oxford physicist. It's a site that engages with the public, asking them to help classify photographs of a million galaxies and it has been an outstanding success and one of the biggest citizen-science experiments on the web. Members of the public log on and classify galaxies, and occasionally their classifications have been better than, professional astronomers! There's a hope that Galaxy Zoo will be able to provide a model that will now engage the public to help in the huge task of digitising the weather logs left by sailors. Information from major Antarctic expeditions is being digitised by the Met Office.

The other plans for this week's meeting are - persuading the many countries that currently refuse to provide meteorological information to the rest of the world to do so, as to make accurate forecasts scientists need daily temperature readings; and creating a global network of weather stations that would provide daily temperature readings for any spot on the planet. Currently, only monthly readings are generated for the US and Europe. There is virtually no data for much of Africa, the Amazon and Antarctica.

Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, says, "It is now very clear that humanity is changing the climate through the greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere. We need to answer key questions such as whether the onset of the monsoon in India will be delayed, how the frequency of droughts in the Horn of Africa is changing, or whether Europe will experience more severe heat-waves in future."