STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This is Presidents Day for those who celebrate, and we have a look at a Founding Father who kept meticulous notes on the weather. All those notes are now becoming a historic weather record. Radio IQ meteorologist Nick Gilmore reports.
NICK GILMORE, BYLINE: Historians say President Thomas Jefferson was very curious about the weather.
ALISON DOLBIER: And we know he went out and bought a thermometer, and then he started taking readings the next day.
GILMORE: That's Alison Dolbier, an editor of the Thomas Jefferson Weather Records project. Her team has been working to digitize and tabulate weather-related notes from the nation's third president. They want to create a historical weather database of sorts.
DOLBIER: 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.
GILMORE: To give you an idea of Jefferson's weather records, enter historical actor and interpreter Bill Barker, who works for Monticello - the Founding Father's former home.
BILL BARKER: (As Thomas Jefferson) October 16, 17 and 85, Paris, France. Fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit - the first day of uninterrupted sunshine from sunrise to sunset which I have seen in Paris.
GILMORE: Jefferson kept tabs on the weather before, after and during his presidency.
BARKER: (As Thomas Jefferson) August 13, 1807, Monticello. Remarkable flood - about as high or a little higher than that of 17 and 95. It came into the loft of the toll mill and 5 1/2 feet above the floor of the millstones of the large mill.
GILMORE: Jefferson's records were remarkable, considering the time in which he lived. There was no weather forecasting. Besides using a thermometer, Dolbier says Jefferson used other tools, including a hygrometer to measure humidity levels.
DOLBIER: And there were a lot of different varieties of hygrometers. Those measurements are probably the least consistent because he kept using different instruments. Or he had a rain gauge. He would let us know how much rain down to the hundred-thousandths place. It was a little crazy.
GILMORE: His notes on the weather align with his approach to life says Billy Wayson, a historian who is working on his own project analyzing the Founding Father's financial documents.
BILLY WAYSON: So whether it was traveling in the South of France and recording how they grew wine grapes down there or whether it was drawing a plan for remodeling Monticello, he would use numbers. But the numbers were a way he used to order his world.
GILMORE: Numbers like the temperature inside and outside of his bedroom. He kept detailed notes on vegetation, too. Dolbier hopes to expand the historical weather data beyond Jefferson's records and include diaries and notes from farmers at the time that she says also need to be rescued and digitized.
For NPR News, I'm Nick Gilmore.
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