What can centuries-old whaling ship logs tell us about today's extreme weather?

According to scientists, quite a lot.

They're using the information recorded by mariners going back hundreds of years

to push the frontier of modern-day climate science.

Special correspondent Pamela Watts with Rhode Island PBS has our story.

Thank you. Pamela Watts with Rhode Island PBS has our story.

Observations of winds that once buffeted this 1800s whaling ship are offering up some critical clues to climate change.

The Charles W. Morgan is an attraction at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. It's the last of an American fleet that once numbered close to 3,000, and the oldest wooden commercial whaling vessel still afloat.

Ship logbooks of its many whale hunting voyages, along with hundreds of others from New England,

may provide a treasure island for researchers trying to learn more about extreme weather challenges.

Oh, wow.

The idea to take a deep dive into weather data from centuries-old logbooks was launched by Timothy Walker,

sailor, marine historian, and professor at UMass Dartmouth.

These logbooks hold a lot of information about weather because the whalers were taking daily

and multiple times a day.

They're writing down the winds and the temperatures and the wind direction and wind speed

and so on. And so we wanted to know if we could extract that weather data to inform climate science.

And it turns out that you can.

Walker came to New Bedford, Massachusetts to crew on the historic schooner Ernestina.

One of his shipmates happened to be working on his PhD in climate ocean science.

And he and I had talked about a way to do something with both of our skill sets.

That discussion led to Walker Fishing for Weather Information from the logs of local whaling ships

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