Join a mammoth citizen science project – no expertise needed

Are you up for giving some of your self-isolation time to help with a giant weather digitisation effort?
Scientists at Reading University are looking for volunteers to help digitise handwritten records dating back 200 years or more that were painstakingly collected and recorded by the weather experts of the time. Being able to access information in a more computer friendly format will be used to help scientists better understand and compare current and future weather patterns and the frequency and scale of big droughts and floods, all of which can be used to plan the flood and water resources infrastructure needed in the future.  Your help will enable them to do that.

Help needed to rescue UK’s old rainfall records

Having already scanned in a massive 65,000 documents and sheets of information there’s no need to scour through dusty old records. Looking for volunteers that can help out with just a couple of minutes or even an hour now and then it’s a simple case of visiting the  Rainfall Rescue website, reading the scribbled rainfall amounts and entering the numbers onto an online log.

From information collected so far it seems that some previous years have had worse rainfalls than we had at the start of the year with meteorologists suspecting that October 1903 could have been worse. Transferring these and previous paper records into computer data will enable scientists to analyse weather patterns and be more precise.

FIND OUT MORE & GET INVOLVED