The weather project

Over the past couple of days I was nursing a cold and wanted to find something useful that I could do in bed/on the sofa. "Old Weather" is a citizen science project using volunteers to transcribe the weather data from hundreds of Royal Navy ships' logs. The masses of information will then be used to test climate change models and improve predictions. It's very absorbing as the scanned logs are quite hard to decipher but the site is really well designed and you can follow the progress of all the ships on maps and diagrams. Tonight I'm hoping to finish entering enough data to be promoted to lieutenant!

www.oldweather.org