FOR YEARS, scientists have been poring over old ship logs, scouring weather reports for clues about changes in the Earth’s climate. But there was a World War II-sized hole in their research: the hostilities disrupted commercial shipping and reduced the number of weather reports sailors were producing. Trade between the United States and Asia, in particular, ground to a halt.
Of course, there were plenty of naval ships patrolling the Pacific from 1941-1945. And they were under orders to log their whereabouts and record the weather conditions every hour and to do so in a standardized way. However, the military classified this meteorological motherlode and made it off-limits to climate researchers. A breakthrough finally came in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 192,500 pages of U.S. Nav y Command files, mostly from the Pacific and mostly from 1941 to 1946.
