Thanks to the efforts of thousands of volunteers who were brought together by their passion for the weather, Britain's official rainfall records now go back to the year before Queen Victoria ascended the throne.
The project began when Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in England, put out a call for help transcribing more than 65,000 handwritten logs of monthly rainfall from across Britain and Ireland.
Human eyes were needed to read the writing in the records. In a little over two weeks, more than 16,000 people answered Dr. Hawkins' request and chewed through the task.
During Britain's first coronaviruses lockdown, that was two years ago. The nation's weather agency, the Met Office, has processed 3.3 million data points from the transcribed pages and added them to its national rainfall statistics, enriching the official record with many more observations and extending it back to 1836. There is new detail on the weather of 1852, when a dry spring was followed by flooding in November and December.
If the weather that brought us so much rain in 1852 were to happen again, we would probably get more rain because we live in a warmer world. He said that better information on past extremes can help fortify our defenses.
The study was published on Friday in the geosciences data journal.
He said that they have hardly scratched the surface of what they can learn from Britain's climate archives.
Catherine Ross, an archiver at the Met Office and author of the new study, said that the agency knew the value of the data when it was scanned in 2019. Dr. Ross said that the handwritten information was useful for scientific analysis.
The records start in 1677. The British Rainfall Organization coordinated the collection of data by 1860, which later became part of the Met Office. Clergymen, ordinary citizens and wealthy people were involved in the task. The royals were apparently included in the last category, which included the archives.
The Victorian Age was when people wanted to control, measure, and understand more in detail.
The record-keepers revealed the care they invested in the task and some of the challenges in the notes they kept with the rainfall logs. The Reverend W. Borlase, in the village of Ludgvan, Cornwall, added a note to his reading. It might have been too late. Don't know.
Vandals, obstruction by birds, and damage by tourists were documented by the observers. There was a bullet hole in the gauge in 1948. In the 1950s, record-keeping was put on hold for more than two years because the gauge was hidden.
The rain gauge in the village of West Ayton was destroyed by enemy action in 1944, and the record-keeper ended readings in 1949.
The data had to be organized by precise location after the records were transcribed. Its own challenges were presented. In a glen among the hills is where the rain gauge in Scotland is located.
The climate stripes are a way of showing global warming. He is working on an online project to record weather observations made by ships in the 19th century. It is part of a larger initiative that aims to extend records of worldwide surface temperatures back to the 1780s. Most global temperature records start in the 1850s.
Scientists can use the additional information to better understand the Earth's climate before the Industrial Revolution and the large-scale carbon emissions from human activity. It could show how the climate reacted to several volcanic eruptions in the early 19th century, including the one at Mount Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, that chilled the planet and caused a year without a summer.
We haven't had a really big one since 1816, according to Dr. Hawkins. Understanding the consequences of an eruption like that ahead of time would be useful.
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