One of the key, driving forces behind the genesis of this newsletter was the idea that the weather impacts and influences us all. Because of that, there has always been an interest in knowing more about the atmosphere above our heads and how it will impact our day-to-day.
The idea of a “citizen meteorologist” has been around for a very long time. And this month – in which we celebrated President’s Day – I thought it would be good to focus on a presidential citizen meteorologist – Thomas Jefferson.
“He took these weather readings periodically over a 30-to-40-year time period. Our first weather reading we have is July of 1776,” says Alison Dolbier, an editor with the Thomas Jefferson Weather Records – a collaborative project between several parties, including the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University and the Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia. “And we know he went out and bought a thermometer, and then he started taking readings the next day.”
Dolbier says Jefferson’s records were preserved in a number of locations – including in the Library of Congress. But his weather data was never in an accessible form.
“With the advent of the internet, that made doing something with the weather records more practical – because if somebody wants to use the data, it’s much easier for them to manipulate it online than to have to get a book and read through it and look for it.”
The pages of Jefferson’s weather observations had already been digitized, but Dolbier and her team got to work in doing data entry of the records.
There were some gaps in the data…
“He was a very busy man!”
But the records show that no matter when he wrote them down, the nation’s third president was deeply fascinated with recording the conditions around him – which was a challenge at the time.
“Measuring of the weather – having instruments to do that – was fairly new at the time. And there are a lot of different varieties of hygrometers. Those measurements are probably the least consistent because he kept using different instruments. He also had a barometer. He measured the wind and he recorded precipitation – sometimes just whether it was raining or snowing. Sometimes how much snow there was, he had a rain gauge – he would let us know how much rain down to the hundred thousandths place. It was little crazy.”
Dolbier says that’s not all of the oddities in Jefferson’s weather records, either.
“He did comparisons between the temperature in his bedroom and the temperature outside. And he would do that with the window a little open, halfway open.”
Jefferson also maintained a vegetable market chart, where he kept track of when things went in and out of season – something he did throughout his entire eight years in the White House.
Dolbier adds that Jefferson’s fascination with the weather didn’t just stop with him and where he was – whether that was in D.C. or at his home, Monticello.
“He wanted to be able to compare. We have weather records from Quebec, from France. William Dunbar and, then later, Lewis and Clark were tasked with keeping track of the weather and the wildlife and other natural scenes that they came upon so that they could compare the climates.”
Dolbier says the Thomas Jefferson Weather Records project is just the beginning of her team’s efforts to compile historical weather data.
“We’re all working together to find more data sets in other repositories – people’s diaries. A farmer might mention it was a cool day, it was a rainy day – couldn’t plant. So, it actually has led to this new project where we’re going to try to rescue more data, weather history, in other American repositories.”
You can see more of the project here.
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