- Location: Great Britain, Ireland
- Institution: University of Reading
- Status: Active
- Type: Research
- Theme: Monitoring
- Timeframe: 2024 - 2029
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Heavy rainfall and other extreme weather events can have serious consequences for people, infrastructure, wildlife and the wider environment. Climate change is making these extreme events more intense, so it is becoming increasingly important to understand how and why this is happening.
To do this, researchers need detailed weather records to go back as far as possible. This project aims to recover millions of observations to push back our reconstructions to earlier decades. This would include some historically significant periods, such as 1872, the wettest year ever recorded in the UK, and October 1903, the wettest month on record.
The good news is that weather observations have been recorded across the UK and Ireland for well over a century. The problem is that the vast majority of these records still only exist as handwritten notes on paper. Almost none of this information is currently available to researchers because it has never been converted into digital data.
This project will use artificial intelligence to process many 10,000s of scanned images and turn them into usable data. This will provide researchers with a much clearer picture of how extreme weather has changed over time and help to inform decisions about how we adapt to our changing climate.
Project Goals
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This project will use Large Language Models (LLMs) to read and extract data from the scanned sheets.
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A partnership with the Met Office will mean that the newly recovered data can be used to update the UK’s official records, making them more accurate and detailed than ever before.
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Similar projects are already underway in Ireland to recover historical weather records. This project will look for opportunities to connect these efforts, sharing methods and data across both countries, with input from universities and national weather services on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Institutions
