CLIWOC
CLIWOC
Climatological Database for the World's Oceans
Our aim was to discover more about the changing climate over the world's oceans before industrialisation could have had any significant influence on climate and weather. To do this we called upon the thousands of naval documents and in particular logbooks kept by officers from the 17th century onwards.
Logbooks from before 1850 are to be found in large numbers only in the archives of just four countries: Britain, Holland, France and Spain. These documents tell us much about day-to-day weather in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. The CLIWOC project was the first attempt by scientists to explore this valuable resource.
The CLIWOC project was a EU-funded research programme designed to abstract, interpret and analyse the data from these sources.