The Quest to Scan Millions of Weather Records - The Atlantic

"Deep in the dusty catalogs of weather stations and meteorological offices all over the world are hidden treasures. They're easy to miss if you're not looking for them—often taking the form of, well, piles of moldy papers. But on those pieces of paper are hundreds of years of weather records—data that could make climate science far more accurate. The International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO) estimates that there are 100 million paper strip charts—records that list weather conditions—sitting in meteorological storage facilities throughout the world. That’s about 200 million observations unused by scientists, data that could greatly improve their models. Now, a few small groups of scientists are trying digitize these records, but they’re facing all kinds of obstacles.  Climate scientists often bemoan the lack of historic records. There are the famous data sets: the Vostok ice core drilled in the 1970s that looks back about 400,000 years, the Keeling curve started in 1958, data from satellites that watch sea ice retreat starting around 1979. But these are spot points in specific places that only span a short amount of time. To truly understand climate, researcher need a global records that reaches back hundreds of years ... The IEDRO teams take a different tack—searching for records in the back rooms at local weather stations all over the world. Instead of having their people do the scanning, IEDRO set up weather stations with their own scanners, and hires local people to do the digitizing. IEDRO focuses on creating local jobs around climate digitization projects, and once the project is complete the scanners and other equipment are donated to the weather station ... With either approach, the task entails hundreds of hours of scanning and data inputting. So both ACRE and IEDRO have started toying with crowdsourcing the data-input side of things. Once the pages are scanned, they upload them to sites like Old Weather, where volunteers can help the scientists and get 'promoted' in a little game they’ve created  ..."