Coronavirus Is Turning U.K. Residents Into Climate ‘Citizen Scientists’
Professor Ed Hawkins is drawing on the nation’s reserves of excess time to transcribe more than a century of rainfall data.
A weather clerk measures rainfall on a roof in London on Sept. 12, 1933.
Photographer: J. A. Hampton/Hulton Archive via Getty ImagesWell before Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a stay-at-home order for the U.K., Professor Ed Hawkins of the National Center for Atmospheric Science at Reading University recognized that people might have some extra time on their hands. He put his thought into a tweet: “Right, would anyone be up for a challenge by helping us digitise all this historical rainfall data over the next few weeks/months?”
The U.K. has detailed data on annual rainfall going back to the early 1960s, but before that all the records were kept by hand, making that information difficult for climate scientists to analyze. With so many Britons suddenly shut up at home with little to do except binge-watch Netflix, however, Hawkins and his colleagues suddenly had an army of analog transcribers just waiting to be tapped.