Old Weather Voyages

Can you believe that Old Weather is 44% complete‽ I can’t, but that’s what the site is currently telling me. It’s amazing how much care and effort has been poured into this project by people all over the world. 63 vessels are now complete and the task of processing and understanding everything is underway.

Yesterday we said we had a little thank you coming and here it is: Old Weather Voyages. Stuart Lynn, the principal developer for Old Weather, and myself have been toying with the idea of displaying your weather and event transcriptions in a fun and interesting way. Old Weather Voyages lets you see the data that you have all provided in a way that puts the voyages of these ships front and centre

The Old Weather Voyages site displays one ship’s log book at a time and lets you watch events unfold as they did nearly a centrury ago. you can either just sit back and watch the ship at it voyages around the globe, or you can grab the time slider and whiz back and forth, seeing what happens and when.

As the ship moves around the world, its track is coloured according the the sea temperatures that have been recorded. The events from the ship’s log are shown on the log page on the left hand side. The image below shows the voyage of the HMS Africa up to the afternoon of Saturday November 3rd 1917. The log on the left shows that there have been several sicknesses reported over the past week on the ship. The ship’s track shows that the water is warmer nearer the equator than it is in South Africa, for example.

We hope that this new way of exploring the Old Weather data shows not only that the information being transcribed is coherent and useful, but also that your data really does go somewhere! We are often asked, here at the Zooniverse, what happens to your clicks and transcriptions. Here is a great way to explore the early results of the project and explore the history behind the science.

Other fun ships, to get you started, include HMS Inflexible, HMS Goliath and HMS M31.

[If you have a Mac, you can also grab Old Weather Voyages as a screensaver]