Environmental data rescue is a collection of processes, including
photography
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employe ...
and
scanning, that stores historical and modern environmental
data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete Value_(semiotics), values that convey information, describing quantity, qualitative property, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of sy ...
in a usable
format. The data is then analyzed and used in
scientific models
Scientific modelling is a scientific activity, the aim of which is to make a particular part or feature of the world easier to understand, define, quantify, visualize, or simulate by referencing it to existing and usually commonly accepted ...
. Historical
weather
Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloud cover, cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmos ...
information helps meteorologists and climatologists understand past trends in weather changes, which helps them forecast and predict future weather.
One method takes digital photographs of environmental datum stored on paper medium and then ships the images to a facility where they are entered into a
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
.
Throughout the world, some estimate 700,000 pieces of data are lost every day due to
ink
Ink is a gel, sol, or solution that contains at least one colorant, such as a dye or pigment, and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing or writing with a pen, brush, reed pen, or quill. Thicker ...
s fading,
paper
Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distrib ...
deteriorating,
magnetic tape print-through
Print-through is a generally undesirable effect that arises in the use of magnetic tape for storing analog information, in particular music, caused by contact transfer of signal patterns from one layer of tape to another as it sits wound concent ...
etc. A rough estimate of 100 billion parameter values that are still on paper exists,
microfiche
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. F ...
,
microfilm
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either photographic film, films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the origin ...
, and magnetic tape that are in a format unusable by computers and scientists alike, which need to be
digitized. This data is stored on a variety of media from paper, microfiche, to older magnetic tapes that are going bad.
Once data is digitized, it can be used to help a large range of people from
farmer
A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer m ...
s to
engineer
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limit ...
s and in scientific pursuits such as climate studies.
National Climatic Data Center
The United States National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), previously known as the National Weather Records Center (NWRC), in Asheville, North Carolina, was the world's largest active archive of weather data. Starting as a tabulation unit in New Or ...
is the current collection point for this data within the
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.
Historical Environmental Data are also used as a basis for "Disease Vectorization" where the areal spread of airborne diseases are correlated to historical weather conditions so that in future outbreaks, health care teams can predict the direction and rate of spread of the disease so that remedial actions can begin before the disease reaches the vulnerable population. Historic data are also used in designing structures such as bridges and buildings, assist the 1.8 billion subsistence farmers throughout the world better plan crops alleviating starvation.
The International Environmental Data Rescue Organization, a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization has already participated in the rescue and digitization of one million historic weather observations in Africa and South America: http://IEDRO.ORG
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Environmental science