Digitizing weather observations from World War <scp>II US</scp> naval ship logbooks

Abstract The number and coverage of weather observations over the oceans were considerably reduced during World War II (WW2) due to disruptions normal trade routes. that do exist for this period are often unavailable science as they still only available paper records or scanned images. We have rescued detailed hourly contained in more than 28,000 logbook images US Navy Pacific Fleet stationed at Hawai'i 1941–1945 produce a dataset 630,000 records. Each record contains date time, positional information several meteorological measurements, totalling 3 million individual observations. data rescue process consisted citizen project asking volunteers transcribe from images, followed by additional quality control processes. This not air temperature, sea surface atmospheric pressure, wind speed direction, mainly Ocean but also includes some Atlantic Indian Oceans. new found be good inter‐comparing independent measurements taken on ships travelling convoy comparing with 20th‐Century Reanalysis. provides invaluable instrumental times places WW2, which fill gaps existing reconstructions.