If you like to hear stories about citizen science and the weather, you will love this one. According to a recent story in The Conversation, 66,000 pieces of paper containing very old weather records in the United Kingdom were digitized by volunteers during the pandemic. The records were handwritten, mostly in cursive, which made them almost impossible to digitize using optical character recognition. The National Meteorological Archive had scanned the paper sheets and made the images available online. The University of Reading launched a citizen science project called Rainfall Rescue, asking the public to help make these measurements available to science once more. Each scanned sheet was keyed in by four different volunteers to help reduce errors. While they expected this process to take many months, it only took 16 days for everything to be entered due to the number of people involved in the project. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers, data from more than 700 rain gauges are now available for 1862, allowing them to map rainfall variation in far greater detail than ever before.
