Google & Galaxy Zoo could aid global climate project - by precisely predicting natural disasters

[Turborama]

Climate scientists meeting in Britain this week hope to build a database to predict natural disasters precisely. And records of the voyages of the Bounty and Beagle will assist them in their task

Robin McKie, science editor
The Observer, Sunday September 5 2010


Victims of Pakistan's floods use a railway track to reach a marooned
village. Better global weather data could help to forecast such natural
disasters. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/Reuters



Leading climate scientists will gather in the UK this week to finalise plans for a revolutionary project aimed at transforming their ability to predict meteorological disasters. The goal is to create an international databank that would generate forecasts of unprecedented precision.

The scientists' plans include:

■ Creating a global network of weather stations that would provide daily temperature readings for any spot on the planet. At present, only monthly readings are generated for the United States and Europe, while virtually no data is provided for much of Africa, the Amazon and Antarctica.

■ Digitising old sea logs – including those of the Bounty, the Beagle and Scott's Discovery – to build up a data set of historical weather patterns.

■ Persuading many countries that currently refuse to provide meteorological information to the rest of the world to open their data banks.

■ Seeking help from web companies and organisations such as Google and Galaxy Zoo to help volunteers decode data. In this way, meteorologists hope to transform their long-term forecasts.

"It is now very clear that humanity is changing the climate through the greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere," said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, one of the organisers of this week's meeting. "But we don't know yet, and what we really must find out is how those changes will affect a particular area.

"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 heatwaves in future."

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/05/google-galaxy-zoo-climate-project