Andy Jacobson graduated from Centralia College in 2010 before continuing his education at The Evergreen State College.
When Andy Jacobson first came across the nearly 133-year-old documents in 2010, he didn’t know about the six-year journey they would take him on.
Back then, Jacobson was a student at Evergreen State College, where he’d started after graduating from Centralia College in 2010.
He was researching weather from the 1800s and came across an article from the Morning Olympian from Feb. 1, 1893, titled “Yesterday A Cold Day.”
“I’ve always been interested in weather for a long time, and I’m interested in statistics, and they’re kind of related,” he said.
But in the seemingly mundane news article, Jacobson noticed a reference to Olympia weather records stretching back to 1877. It caught his eye, because current digitized records only went back to December 1895.
These new documents referenced a possible wealth of knowledge: 17 years of Thurston County’s historical weather record that was, for all intents and purposes, completely unknown.
Though it interested him, it was 2012 before he decided to contact the National Climatic Data Center and request copies of the original records penned by the Olympia Army Signal Corps.
He said he originally started analyzing them as a project in 2013 at Evergreen, thinking it would only last a quarter, but when the handwritten documents arrived, he realized it was turning into a much bigger task. He worked with Evergreen Professor Al Josephy for the study.
The handwritten records, which included daily high and low temperatures and precipitation totals, were hard to read and poorly scanned, but he was able to figure out nearly all of the illegible daily portions of the record by comparing them to the monthly totals.
“Some of it was very hard to read, and I had to look at stuff like ranges and sums and see if what I’ve got matches what they’ve got,” he said.
Two years later in April 2015, Jacobson felt confident in his data, and worked with University of Washington professor Mark Albright to approach the National Climatic Data Center for approval of his record. And finally, in March 2016, his data were posted to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website, the official record.
Jacobson said seeing his data accepted was fulfilling.
“I’m pretty happy that finally, to see it become official electronic data, that’s out there for everyone to look at,” he said.
In his review, he found that weather trends weren’t drastically different from today, other than the fact that temperatures have risen.
Notably, summers were a little cooler in the late 1800s. Triple-digit temperatures weren’t recorded until 1906.
He also pinpointed the rainiest year to date: 1879 with 74.55 inches.
Jacobson, 28, said he hopes to find work in either climate or weather science, but is working a temporary job right now.
And looking back on his six-year project, he had no idea what it would blossom into when he started out in 2010.
“I guess I didn’t know it would take as long as it did,” he said.
