UK Met Office founder’s 19th century weather data rescued

Volunteer citizen scientists have recovered weather data first collected by the founder of the UK Met Office more than 150 years ago in a rescue mission that will help scientists better understand changes in extreme weather.

Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, founder of the UK Met Office, started collating measurements on pressure, temperature, and rainfall from across Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe in 1860. These observations were sent by telegraph cable to London every day where they were used to make a ‘weather forecast’ – a term invented by Fitzroy for this endeavour.

Published in Geoscience Data Journal, the study describes the digitisation and recovery of more than 570,000 historical weather observations from 1861-1875, fulfilling a vision first set out by Vice-Admiral Fitzroy to better warn of extreme weather conditions for cargo ships and fishing fleets.

Professor Ed Hawkins, an NCAS University of Reading climate scientist who led the weather recovery, said: "Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy pioneered weather forecasting and collected some of the earliest coordinated meteorological data starting in 1860. Inspired by the sinking of the Royal Charter ship in a severe storm in October 1859, his daily weather reports were the genesis of real-time weather prediction to warn the public of impending storms. Sadly he did not live to see his vision fully realised. More than 150 years later, we have finally completed digitising Fitzroy's early weather records thanks to the efforts of volunteers.”

Climate insights

Initial comparisons reveal Fitzroy’s recovered sea-level pressure measurements will improve existing reconstructions of past storms. The research team hope integrating the observations into global databases will reveal new 19th-century climate insights that Fitzroy first sought.

Professor Hawkins said: “Rescuing these observations enables us to reconstruct key historical storms and other extreme weather with greater accuracy, improving our understanding of the climate during this time. As climate change accelerates, maintaining weather records is more critical than ever for understanding how extreme weather is changing and so ensure more reliable predictions.”

Tragedy at sea

After the Royal Charter ship sank in a violent storm in 1859, Fitzroy resolved to collect real-time weather measurements from stations across Britain's telegraph network to make storm warnings. Starting in 1860, observers telegraphed readings to Fitzroy in London who handwrote them onto Daily Weather Report sheets, enabling the first-ever public weather forecasts starting on 1^st August 1861 and published daily in The Times newspaper. Fitzroy died by suicide in 1865 shortly after founding the UK Met Office, leaving his life's work trapped undiscovered in archives.

More than 150 years later, Professor Hawkins coordinated a team of more than 3,500 online Zooniverse.org platform volunteers to digitise the weather records from Fitzroy’s Daily Weather Reports. Extensive quality control work followed the crowdsourced transcription before public release. The open-access dataset is available for free public use.

Craig, Philip M and Hawkins, E., "Weather observations from the 1861-1875 Met Office Daily Weather Reports", https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5940391

Access the dataset: https://github.com/ed-hawkins/weather-rescue-data/tree/main/dwr-1861-1875