History gives clearer forecast
Aworld-first project could dramatically improve what we know about New Zealand’s weather, by using artificial intelligence to trawl through handwritten records stretching back more than 150 years.
Microsoft will partner with Niwa to effectively train handwriting recognition technology to read historic weather logs, so they can be loaded into a database.
For scientists like Niwa’s Dr Drew Lorrey, rescuing these old records has been painstaking but crucially important, as all the data they capture is used in models of past weather.
Those old logs include a range of material that could yield insights about our weather history.
The first step in the project is to use weather information recorded in July 1939 when it snowed all over New Zealand — even at Cape Reinga.
“Was 1939 the last gasp of conditions that were more common during the Little Ice Age, which ended in the 1800s — or the first glimpse of the extremes of climate change thanks to the Industrial Revolution?” Lorrey said.
Weather records were meticulously kept and entries made several times a day, recording information such as temperature, pressure and wind direction. Comments often included cloud cover, snow drifts or rainfall.
“Having more detail from further back in history helps us characterise these extreme weather events better within the long-term trends.
“Are they a one-in-80-year event, do they just occur at random, can we expect to see these happening with more frequency, and why, in a warming climate, did we get snow in Northland?”
More than a million observations from old logbooks are being painstakingly entered by “citizen scientists” and loaded by hand into the Southern Weather Discovery website.
This is part of the global Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative, which aims to place historic weather into a longer-term context.
In New Zealand, scientists were already seeing benefits of old observations for understanding the Southern Annular Mode, which affects westerly windflow and New Zealand’s rainfall.
“Some of the data have important historic and cultural value too, because they are part of our first instrumental observations.”
As Microsoft NZ’s senior cloud and AI business group lead Patrick Quesnel put it: “Old data is the new data.
“Using AI for handwriting recognition [offers] the ability to preserve so much more scientific and cultural data from old archives that might otherwise be lost forever.
“You could apply the same technology to legal documents, or analyse diaries and letters from around the world and potentially discover lost artworks mentioned somewhere in the records.”