Kathy Wendolkowski is a 49-year-old suburban mother of three with a secret life.
When she is not busy in her kitchen, or doing data entry at home as a contractor for the Environmental Protection Agency, she slips back in time to 1922, joining the crew of the HMS Foxglove, a 1,200-ton minesweeper on patrol along the China coast near Fuchau, north of colonial Hong Kong.
Along with hundreds of OldWeather.org volunteers around the world, Wendolkowski works at her home computer, slowly paging through photo images of the daily logs of 282 Royal Navy ships that sailed the globe from 1914 to 1924.
By extracting the log-keepers' handwritten, six-a-day weather observations and transferring them to an online digital database, the volunteers are filling large voids in the planet's observational record. A more complete record can ultimately improve weather forecasting in many places around the world, and provide a more accurate accounting of how the global climate has changed over time.
From the log-keeper's precise handwriting, she learned that it was 64 degrees off Fuchau at 8 a.m. on Oct. 3, 1922. The wind was north-by-east, at Force 3, under cloudy skies. The barometer read 30.22 inches.
Wendolkowski typed the readings into the computer's digital form and moved on to the noon observation. "We're furthering the sum of human knowledge," she said with a smile.
Wendolkowski and other OldWeather volunteers are a small part of a worldwide effort to rescue old weather data from time and the elements. A diverse collection of nonprofit organizations, government agencies and private companies is working cooperatively to enrich the digital record of the planet's weather by including more places and reaching deeper into the past.
Few are more passionate than Rick Crouthamel about the need for such work. The Deale resident worked for the National Weather Service, helping to rescue historic weather data in Africa and elsewhere. He retired in 2004 in part because he believed the agency was doing too little to use old weather data to save lives.
He tells the story of a man he met in the 1980s in Bangladesh, where most people are subsistence farmers. The farmer told Crouthamel he saved 10 percent of his rice harvest each year so he could feed his family when drought came.
"I asked him how often he had a drought, and he said once every 10 years," Crouthamel recalled. When he asked the farmer how he knew that, the man replied, "Because I have been farming 10 years, and had one drought."
Crouthamel said 100 years of data would be needed to be confident of the actual frequency of drought years. "I was shocked at the vulnerability he was placing his family in because he didn't know the true threat of drought."
By extracting old weather data from 30 years of crumbling Bangladeshi records, Crouthamel discovered the actual drought interval was six to seven years. The farmer had just been lucky, and he was risking the lives of his children.
"It hit me so hard," he said. "That was my passion. I said, 'We have to rescue the data.' "
Today, working largely out of his home, Crouthamel heads an organization called the International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO), a nonprofit doing much the same work he'd done for the weather service.
Today, some 50 IEDRO volunteers travel the world on data rescue missions, funded by NOAA, the World Meteorological Organization, and private donors.
They've found that colonial powers, religious organizations such as Jesuits, and some private entities such as Central American fruit companies, kept careful weather records — some for hundreds of years.
Some are well-preserved; others are fragile and crumbling.
In Mozambique, Crouthamel said, old paper records were wrapped in brown paper, but many of the packages had broken open and some were scattered on the wet floor of a tin shack. In Russia, rescuers have found hangar-sized warehouses crammed floor-to-ceiling with satellite imagery on reels of magnetic tape — tapes that become useless unless rewound once a year.
With local workers, IEDRO provides the materials and equipment to help them locate, organize, box and store the records. Then the volunteers train local people to set up and operate a digital camera and photograph every page.
The images are burned to a DVD and copied. The local meteorological service retains a copy for its use. The duplicate goes to the National Climate Data Center, in Asheville, N.C., providing the raw material needed to improve global forecast models and make weather predictions more accurate.
Better weather data for places like Bangladesh and Mozambique could save millions of lives. It could help farmers become better-prepared for bad weather, or anticipate where weather conditions will cause outbreaks of water- and insect-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever or cholera.
"Old weather data is the one vaccine that can save people from a whole host of maladies — from starvation to disease, with the same data," Crouthamel said.
When the images of the old weather records reach NOAA, it's the job of the Climate Database Modernization Program to convert them into a digital form that can be accessed by anyone over the Internet, and integrated with global climate models.
Tom Ross, who heads the $17 million-a-year program, said there are 97 different projects under way to convert old weather records into modern digital formats. Among the records are TIROS weather satellite photos from the 1960s, "paired" photos of Alaskan glaciers from the early 1900s, drawings of sunspots, marine fisheries data and weather-balloon data from developing countries.
"If we got funded for another 20 or 40 years, we still wouldn't be done, there's just so much out there," Ross said. One example: 75,000 boxes of hourly U.S. airport observations — 410 million of them — from the dawn of commercial aviation in the 1920s to the 1940s.
John Jacobs is program manager for HOV Services, the Beltsville company that does much of the digital scanning for the climate database program. "Originally this … was going to be thrown out," he said. "Now, scientists are saying it's a treasure trove."
After the records are scanned, they are farmed out for keyboarding. The program uses both volunteers who work online from home, and contractors providing more than 300 jobs in high-unemployment regions such as West Virginia, Kentucky, and in Oakland, in Western Maryland.
Once the data is available in digital form, it's up to the weather and climate scientists to process it and integrate it into modern climate models.
Among the organizations doing that work is Atmospheric Circulation Reconstruction Over the Earth, or ACRE, led by Gil Compo, a research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"The idea," he said, "is to take the available global weather data, synthesize or combine them in a mathematically rigorous way, to make a global weather map, for every six hours, as far back as we can go in time, and then use those maps to do climate studies."
Among the questions scientists can then ask, he said: "How have storms changed over the past 130 years? How do climate models simulate those changes? Has El Nino changed? How does climate respond to volcanoes?"
The troves of data that could be used to construct the maps seem endless.
"You also had doctors taking weather observations, looking for a connection between health and the weather," Compo said. "The British told all harbormasters they had to take a certain number of observations every day around the world. The Russian Empire had a great network that expanded with the Trans-Siberian Railway." The French, Dutch, Germans collected data on the colonies they controlled, the Chilean Navy and even the Jesuits "were very interested in making weather observations."
Helping to extract the data from such dusty record books from around the world are people like Wendolkowski.
"Humans are much better at recognizing handwriting than computers," Compo said. "It is somewhat tedious … but I would say it's really important."
So far, OldWeather.org reports its volunteers have completed more than 240,000 pages of logs from 39 ships that sailed for the Royal Navy between 1915 and 1923. That's about 30 percent of the ship-log work.
Wendolkowski, who holds a master's degree in history, confesses the ships' notes on air and water temperature, wind and barometer readings aren't nearly as interesting as the log-keepers' reports on the daily happenings on board.
After a while, she and her 103 online colleagues working and cross-checking the Foxglove logs begin to feel like they're part of the ship's crew, speak in the first person and present tense about life aboard "their" ship.
"Hong Kong is a huge meeting-place," she said. "Ships are coming and going all the time. We exchange salutes with them. Italian and Japanese … even a Chinese admiral came on board a couple days ago. It's very weird talking about this."
In just two months, she said, "I've done 600 some-odd weather observations on 100-something pages of the log. … It's an addiction."
An earlier version misspelled the name of Gil Compo, a research scientist at the University of Colorado. The Sun regrets the error.