International Environmental Data Rescue Organization
While persusing the booths at this year's annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, I stumbled across the International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO), and non-profit organization dedicated to saving old climate records throughout the world. I quickly signed up the Weather Underground to be a financial supporter, and urge those of you interested to contribute to this worthwhile charity!
IEDRO works primarily in third-world countries such as Kenya, Malawi, and the Dominican Republic. They hire and train local people to scan in paper climate records using a digital camera. The data are then keyed into a computer in comma-delimited format, burned onto a CD-ROM, and sent via
courier from the local U.S. embassy directly to the U.S. The final CD-ROMs end up at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).
In many of the countries IEDRO works in, the old climate records are literally molding away in old cardboard boxes. These records often have decayed into non-legibility. So, IEDRO is in a race against time to save the data before they are permanently lost. With the issue of climate change quickly emerging as one of the most important scientific challenges of all time to solve, as much historical data as possible needs to be saved so that we can better see where climate change might be occurring. IEDRO also provides employment to third-world workers who typically desperately need jobs, so IEDRO's efforts have a double benefit.
Dr. Rick Crouthamel of IEDRO describes how the workers they hire digitize data, using the digital camera on the stand behind him.
My next blog will be Friday.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
Page: 1 | 2 — Blog Index
Interesting organization...I'll have to do some reasearch on em.
Look at that highway to NOLA.
In case you didn't see my response in Dr. Master's previous blog entry, I'll repost here...
Inyo,
We absolutely should work on making it (government) better. However, one option for making it better is outsourcing, or privatizing resources/services. If you don't look at all options, you may not be making the best decision you can. That doesn't mean that outsourcing is always the right solution, but how can you know if you don't even look at it.
Now in reference to what you said about hurricane warnings and ignoring all the poor people, that's not quite the way it would work of course. Assuming a private company(s) did run weather forecasts, they aren't going to make their money selling it to individuals. They would make their money selling it to other companies, including news stations, or provide it to consumers a la TWC. They may have a subscription process for individuals who want more details, but it's not like they would provide the data only to individuals who would pay. That wouldn't make any business sense at all. Now, where most TV stations, radio stations, etc., get their data from NWS, they would instead get it from TWC, or Accuweather, or whoever, and they would still have nightly/hourly/whatever weather reports. To assume otherwise isn't really the proper way to view the potentialities.
Anyways to the topic on hand I like what they are doing. Its sounds like a good cause.
I saw no where to donate on the site so I e-mailed them about it.
NOAA is really doing another great service to the world here by taking a part in this, no telling how many lives it could save (the bridge building analogy comes to mind) as well what we might learn.
I noticed the info is digitized, stored & recorded by a govt contractor. This is good as a private company isn't gonna get this done, offer it to anyone that might could use it & turn a profit. Yet a private company is turning a profit on weather without endangering anyone with faster, cheaper, need more profit thinking.
i don't know what things are like on the east coast but on teh west coast, TWC and Accu-Weather are only slightly more accurate than flipping a coil. They provide extremely dumbed down, generalized foreceasts. For someone like me who works in a large mountain range that varies in location and elevation, TWC and Accu-Weather would be largely useless. I'm not looking forward to getting stuck on a peak in a blizzard beacuse accu-weather, as usual, had no concept of the snow level on a mountain range only 30 miles across. I guess i will allow me to get back to the old fashioned way of forecasting weather... watching the clouds and wind, feeling temperature changes and sensing pressure changes. On that alone, i could do better than accu-weather on most mountain locations.
The detailed NWS forecasts, forecast discussions, computer models, and detailed 1 km sattelite pictures are vital to me and to many others. Without these, i would be pretty screwed.. but I don't see accu-weather ever coming through with that stuff. And the TWC website is so buggy and full of ads, it barely runs on my crappy government work computer.
You say it doesnt make business sense not to provide free forecasts... this is silly.. i say it doesnt make sense TO provide free anything.
I know i already posted on this... but i have a LOT of experience with outsourcing. I work for the government now but i have also often been on the other side of outsourcing, on the corporate side.
From my experience, outsourcing is VERY inefficient, leads to extreme drops in quality and timeliness, and ends up costing the government MORE than just doing the work in house. I realize outsourcing is a good way to do things for military contracts, etc, it doesnt make sense to have government plants creating 4000 b-2 bombers, its easier to send it to Northrop or whatever. HOWEVER, in the scienece world, outsourcing has been a disaster. Private firms charge much, much more per hour than a qualified government employee (me) makes. They return substandard documents beacuse the gutted government agency has neither the time nor the resources to answer for. Their top priority is necessarily making money, not producing a good forecast or managing the land in the most beneificial way. And this is all in the short term... few private companies will care about the state a forest will be in 50 years when they are dead.. it's bad business. And with the addition of many 'middlemen', efficiency is slashed dramatically. I feel very strongly that mandated outsourcing has crippled the park and forest service and continues to do so. If it is instituted in the NWS, i don't see why it wouldn't be the same way.
I realize you have positive experiences with some corporations, and like i said, in many places it makes sense. But i strongly urge you to do more research, talk to more governmnet workers AND contract workers, and look into the issue further before you decide this is good for a science field. I can say, very authoratively, that it is very bad.
http://tinyurl.com/qcw37
Hmmm...almost zero over this low...
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
2205 UTC THU MAR 02 2006
WELL DEFINED CUTOFF UPPER LEVEL LOW IS CENTERED OVER THE BAY OF
CAMPECHE NEAR 21N92W.
~ once again notice time, coming out early
Viewing: 1 - 51
Page: 1 | 2 — Blog Index