Abstract
At sea, new use for old weather is now, well, old news. For decades, columns upon columns and pages upon pages of metrological observations, originally kept in nautical logbooks and journals, have been digitalised with increased technological sophistication and scores of transcribers. Today, artificial intelligence is trained to decipher centuries of recorded observations. Both the climate sciences and oceanography have readily utilised this retrieved data to do reanalysis and to model dynamic phenomena. Such digitalisation projects have revived historical studies of the practices in which the observations were first conceived, revealing century-long histories of large-scale “collective empiricism” of, and at, the sea. This has, in turn, challenged the received view of the history of oceanography as something primarily of the 20th century. In this presentation, I will engage with both instances of the use for old weather, the contemporary scientific and the contextually historical, and discuss how the long history of large-scale, distributed and retrieved observational maritime programs and projects challenge notions of data and models.