Kon-Tiki Expedition (1947)

Warning

This expedition is not yet released.

The Kon-Tiki Expedition, led by Thor Heyerdahl, was a raft voyage across the South Pacific from Callao in Peru to the Tuamoto Archipelago.

Regular weather observations were made by Herman Watzinger. The meteorological log has been preserved by the Kon-Tiki Museum.

We might be able to get more observations from this voyage - it’s likely the met. log does not contain everything, but there is not much point: Because the voyage is in the tropics, where weather variability is small, and the agreement between observations and 20CR is pretty good (see Analyses, below); in spite of the shortage of nearby observations, we’d need a lot of very precise observations to make a substantial improvement in the current datasets, and the Kon-Tiki’s observations are not that precise.

Transcribed observations

The observations were transcribed by Sally Wilkinson, from photographs of the meteorological log.

Conversion script

Converted observations