Britain's great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern
climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have
survived from the 17th century onwards.
The logbooks kept by every naval ship, ranging from Nelson’s Victory and
Cook’s Endeavour down to the humblest frigate, are emerging as one of the
world’s best sources for long-term weather data. The discovery has
been made by a group of British academics and Met Office scientists who are
seeking new ways to plot historic changes in climate.
“This is a treasure trove,” said Dr Sam Willis, a maritime historian and
author who is affiliated with Exeter University’s Centre for Maritime
Historical Studies.
“Ships’ officers recorded air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature
and other weather conditions. From those records scientists can build a
detailed picture of past weather and climate.”
A preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks has produced results that raise
questions about climate change theories. One paper, published by Dr Dennis
Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene,
details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s
and 1690s.
Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these
were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe
from about 1600 to 1850.
Wheeler and his colleagues have since won European Union funding to extend
this research to 1750. This shows that during the 1730s, Europe underwent a
period of rapid warming similar to that recorded recently – and which must
have had natural origins.
Hints of such changes are already known from British records, but Wheeler has
found they affected much of the north Atlantic too, and he has traced some
of the underlying weather systems that caused it. His research will be
published in the journal Climatic Change.
The ships’ logs have also shed light on extreme weather events such as
hurricanes. It is commonly believed that hurricanes form in the eastern
Atlantic and track westwards, so scientists were shocked in 2005 when
Hurricane Vince instead moved northeast to hit southern Spain and Portugal.
Many interpreted this as a consequence of climate change; but Wheeler, along
with colleagues at the University of Madrid, used old ships’ logs to show
that this had also happened in 1842, when a hurricane followed the same
trajectory into Andalusia.
The potential of Royal Navy ships’ logs to offer new insights into historic
climate change was spotted by Wheeler after he began researching weather
conditions during famous naval battles. Later, as global warming moved up
the scientific agenda, he and others realised that the same data could shed
light on historic climate change.
He said: “British archives contain more than 100,000 Royal Navy logbooks from
around 1670 to 1850 alone. They are a stunning resource.”
Most of these earlier documents contain verbal descriptions of weather rather
than numerical data, because ships lacked the instruments to take numerical
readings. However, Wheeler and his colleagues found early Royal Navy
officers recorded weather in consistent language.
“It means we can deduce numerical values for wind strength and direction,
temperature and rainfall,” he said. The information will ultimately
contribute to the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmos-phere Data Set, a
global database maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, a US government agency.
Wheeler makes clear he has no doubts about modern human-induced climate
change. He said: “Global warming is a reality, but what our data shows is
that climate science is complex and that it is wrong to take particular
events and link them to CO2 emissions. These records will give us a much
clearer picture of what is really happening.”
The Met Office has also set up a project, part-funded by Defra, the
environment ministry, to study 900 logbooks kept by the East India Company
on voyages between Europe and the Far East between 1780 and 1840. Its
vessels carried thermometers and barometers so the data is of higher quality.
Faced with logs taken over so many voyages, the researchers have had to be
selective. One of the most avid recorders of such data was Nelson himself,
whose personal logbook records the air pressure and other readings he took
up to several times daily.
Explorers with a weather eye
Britain’s explorers left vital records of weather around the world
— Robert FitzRoy was captain of HMS Beagle on two expeditions in the 1820s and
1830s. Charles Darwin was his passenger
— Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson’s voyages took him to the Arctic, the East
and West Indies and the Mediterranean before his death at Trafalgar in 1805
— Captain James Cook mapped much of Canada and the Pacific in the 1760s
and 1770s
