Our Mission: To Save a Planet in Peril

We are increasingly aware of the delicate balance between humanity and our environment—and we ignore the urgent need to preserve and protect our planet at our own peril.

But our understanding of global warming and climate change is incomplete. To fully comprehend the global environmental challenges we face, we need to collect and analyze as much raw data as possible.

Many countries of the world are establishing a Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) composed of new observation sites to closely monitor weather trends over the next century. Countless observations of temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed, pressure, precipitation, and sunshine will be carefully added to this digital climate database. In approximately 100 years, we'll have enough data to realize it is too late to take corrective actions to stem the trend towards extreme climate throughout the world.

Rather than wait 100 years to understand climate change, there is a quicker, cheaper solution. There are an estimated two to three billion historic weather observations throughout the world that are on deteriorating paper. Thousands disintegrate each day and their data is lost forever. Ship logs show tides and currents, as well as winds and waves. Other data are found in photographs of glaciers—one of the best ways to measure the change in a region's average temperature. For a fraction of the cost and the time being expended on CGOS, we could rescue each piece of old environmental information, digitize it, and place it on a secure medium for everyone’s use. Questions about climate change could be answered quickly; hopefully in time for mankind to take corrective measures.

Most of the vintage weather data we need remains to be collected. In many countries, data are not organized but consigned to boxes and forgotten. Some are relegated to open shelves, subject to moisture, dust, heat, and neglect. When space is needed for other activities, the data are most often discarded to make way for more recent documents that are perceived as more valuable.

One estimate indicates there are eight hundred million critical old weather observations, some handwritten and others on graphs, awaiting recovery. If not rescued, this data is in imminent peril of being lost forever.

The data rescued by the International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO) enables the meteorological and scientific communities to provide more accurate severe weather forecasting and to understand climate change.  This knowledge offers the world community a greater ability to more accurately predict long-range weather patterns, and thus it enables meterorological professionals to: