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Global wind data from nineteenth century New England whaling ship voyages
Dataset

Global wind data from nineteenth century New England whaling ship voyages

Finn Wimberly, Caroline Ummenhofer, Tessa Giacoppo and Timothy Dale Walker
MBLWHOI Library Dataverse
2026

Abstract

age of sail archival research Arts and Humanities Computer and Information Science Earth and Environmental Sciences historical climatology historical weather data marine weather observations maritime history New England nineteenth century oceanic climate data paleoclimatology ship logbooks whaling logbooks
This data deposit includes three main components and two supplemental files. The first element is a metadata file (overview.tab) which provides summaries of each individual logbook (e.g., number of total entries in the logbook, number of entries which include usable wind descriptions, and the archive where the physical logbook lives). The second aspect, located within the "wind_entries" directory, is four versions of the wind dataset made available as .csv files. These tabular datasets provide the complete store of vetted logbook entries that have had missing coordinates infilled to varying degrees (single day gaps, two day gaps, and three to five day gaps). The dataset is structured such that each row contains one daily entry. This allows the entire dataset to be easily subset by logbook, a date range, or geographic coordinates. Every row contains the Logbook ID, page number, entry date, latitude and longitude (in both DMS and DD) and extracted wind observations. Wind observations include the direction and force as recorded in the logbook, as well as numeric representations assigned by our workflow (direction in 0–360° and force on the Beaufort scale). The third component of the dataset is a set of .pngs showing the voyage paths of each logbook. These are found in the "figures" folder. The inclusion of this imagery is designed to allow for easy visual exploration of the dataset. These images can be accessed via links in the overview file. Finally, the repository also includes .txt files of all (categorized) wind force descriptions and wind direction descriptions within the "txt_files" directory.
url
https://doi.org/10.26027/datawjbavuView
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