WHEN A LITTLE BIT OF SPRING CLEANING GOES A LONG WAY:
DIGITIZING HISTORICAL CLIMATE DATA BOOKLETS
When the Environment Canada Library announced their plan to throw out stacks of old weather data booklets in summer 2018, Waterloo librarian Kathy Szigeti recognized an opportunity to salvage this historical data and make it more accessible to researchers doing critical climate change research:
“Weather is fleeting; having a picture of the earth as it was, which is what these booklets offer, is an important part of studying the impact of our changing climate to come up with vital solutions for the future.”
Szigeti jumped into a van with Dr. Julie Fridell, a former associate director of the Canadian Cryospheric Information Network and the Polar Data Catalogue, a Waterloo research initiative. Together they collected 332 copies of Solar Radiation and Radiation Balance Data (SSR). Published by the Hydrometeorological Service of the former USSR from the 1950s to 1990s, these booklets (which were published and mailed to libraries around the world), contain climate data from international observation stations.
With the booklets in hand, the digitization process could begin. It’s much more complex than simply scanning pages but it’s a comparatively low-cost way to provide essential climate data needed to support climate research being done across various disciplines. While scanning started at the Library with a co-op student, a computer science graduate student began researching and developing techniques to convert the scans into a high quality, machine-readable format to make this data easily accessible and searchable.
As scanning continues, Szigeti is starting the next phase of the digitization process: developing accurate descriptions of the data, which are critical to its findability. These descriptions will include important notations like changes to units of measurement – or country names that provide the necessary clarity – when interpreting historical information.
There are still some big decisions to be made, including how best to organize all of this data to make it easily findable and searchable, but work continues as time and funding allows. The ultimate goal is to publish this data digitally, permitting widespread access and use. Sometimes, a little bit of spring cleaning sparks an idea that could benefit the entire world.