This is one of my favourite podcasts from the UK National Archives published 10 Sep 2010 Sailors, storms and science: how Royal Navy logbooks help us understand climate change.
Dr Dennis Wheeler, from the University of Sunderland, discusses the use of historical Royal Navy logbooks in studies of climate change, focusing on the archival resources rather than scientific conclusions. The Ships’ logbooks were the main resource used to monitor the weather in the oceans. Officers onboard kept careful records of the daily, and sometimes hourly, climate conditions. What that means today is modern researchers are able to find out what the weather was like anywhere in the world on a particular day.
This talk was given as part of the Using Archival Sources to Inform Contemporary Debates training course, which was held at The National Archives, Kew, on the 16 and 17 February 2010
Related articles
- Historical Street Archive at the National Archives (cumpstonresearch.wordpress.com)
