August ’21 – Project Funded to Collect Weather Data from PPL’s Nicholson Whaling Collection

PPL received a $450,000 grant from Rhode Island-based FM Global to fund continued research in an ongoing collaborative effort by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMassD). The project, first developed in 2019 by Dr. Caroline Ummenhofer, WHOI oceanographer and climate scientist, and Dr. Timothy Walker, a maritime historian at UMassD is investigating the role of historical weather data in current climate change research, and the increasingly urgent issues surrounding it. Investigators will review and extract weather data from thousands of whaling ship logbooks dating as far back as the late 1700s. This data will then be analyzed in order to make it comparable to modern weather readings, which will help address contemporary questions of climate change. The fact that PPL’s vast collection of nearly 800 whaling logbooks are digitized, including qualitative descriptions, will make mining this important data that much easier.