Volunteers help unearth climate history 

The South Eastern Australian Recent Climate History project (SEARCH) is enlisting the help of online volunteers to reconstruct south-eastern Australia’s climate record for the past 200-500 years.

Researchers at Melbourne University are working with partners, including NSLA, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of NSW and the State Library of Victoria, to create Australia’s first searchable database of climate information using a diverse range of pre-C20th historical records.

The database will fill the current gap in our knowledge of Australia’s climate history before the establishment of the Bureau of Meteorology in 1908. Library partners are playing a key role in the project by providing access to items in their collections, including:

• documentary records from newspaper articles, governors’ records and early settler accounts
• early weather data in the form of weather journals, government gazettes and pre-Federation observatories.

The project aims to increase our understanding of natural fluctuations in Australia’s climate and how this has been amplified by industrially-driven climate change since the 1950s, which may help to refine climate models. Making the data freely available online will also allow this information to be easily accessed and used by other researchers, organisations, government departments and the public.

SEARCH is looking for volunteers with a strong interest in climate to extract information from online records such as newspaper articles or meteorological tables. See the OzDocs website for more information or to register as a volunteer.

Image: Weather Witch by Vermin Inc (cropped), licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)