One morning at the Blue Hill Observatory and Science Center, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Boston, chief weather observer Matthew Douglas takes a familiar route: he climbs a staircase in a round tower and emerges on the roof to record the previous day’s sunlight. A heavy glass ball in a metal cradle burns a thin streak into a strip of paper, part of a routine Douglas has followed daily for years with the same staff and volunteer tools the observatory has used since it opened in 1885.
Douglas, who has worked at Blue Hill since 1997, described the work as repetitive in process even as conditions change in the world outside the observatory. “My routine is the same every day,” he said. “The only thing that changes are the numbers and the weather itself.”
Blue Hill Executive Director Alex Evans said the observatory is one of the nation’s oldest continually operating weather stations and that it has long depended on instruments that remain similar in principle to the early tools. Evans said staff and volunteers have used mercury and alcohol thermometers, hygrometers that use human hair to measure moisture in the air, and the roof-based glass sphere that tracks bright sunshine hours. He said that keeping instruments in place over nearly a century and a half helps observers distinguish real changes in weather patterns from shifts that can result when instruments and methods are replaced.
Douglas said the “tried and true database” matters for climate research because it provides continuity over long periods. He said that, with largely unchanged tools, if observers spot changes in patterns, they can be more confident the shifts are not just measurement artifacts from new instruments producing data differently than older equipment.
While some observatories have moved to automated digital systems, Blue Hill’s daily practice includes manual observation and recording. Inside the tower, Douglas and deputy chief observer Amanda Joly work with charts, spreadsheets and sun-recording materials, including wind-speed charts drawn on EKG paper and computers where temperature and humidity are recorded. The observatory also keeps reference instruments on site for visitors, including mercury barometers and a Campbell-Stokes recorder whose glass sphere uses sunlight to burn a mark on paper.
Scientists and meteorologists say the value of such long records is in their ability to show slow trends that emerge over decades rather than over short weather cycles. Chris Fiebrich, a meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma, said Blue Hill’s long-running dataset is “golden” and that it is uniquely useful because climate change involves gradual shifts. He said the clearest view of those trends depends on measurements that go back to periods “before we had satellites” and other modern equipment.
Blue Hill’s data also flows beyond its hilltop. The observatory sends a daily summary of its observations to the National Weather Service, which chief scientist Michael Iacono said can contribute to weather forecasts in some circumstances. Iacono said Blue Hill also sends monthly summaries to the National Centers for Environmental Information, where they can be distributed to climate researchers, and that local television meteorologists sometimes receive the daily summaries and may use them in broadcasts.
According to the reporting, Blue Hill’s records show changes that researchers use to make climate signals more visible at a local scale. The observatory’s history includes evidence of an increase in average annual temperature of about 5 degrees Fahrenheit (about 2.8 degrees Celsius) since 1885, and a finding that two nearby ponds remain frozen for nearly three weeks less in winter than they did then. The observatory’s staff also said the length of bright sunshine increased after a low point in the 1980s, a trend they link in part to improvements in air quality following the Clean Air Act and later amendments that reduced emissions of pollutants such as particulate matter.
Blue Hill’s approach also serves a public-facing purpose, organizers said, by making measurement tangible for visitors and schoolchildren who may hear about climate change in abstract terms. Alan Sealls, president of the American Meteorological Society, said that because the word “climate” is politically demonized in some circles, places like Blue Hill can be “a small part of many possible solutions” by helping people, including children, see how weather and climate science connect.
Blue Hill staff also reported that their continuity and outreach depend on resources. The story said that since 2025 budget cuts and layoffs have affected federal weather institutions as climate science has faced political pressure, but that Blue Hill has been a private nonprofit and has avoided much of that turmoil. Still, executive director Evans said funding opportunities are limited in the current political environment.
In addition to maintaining the classic tower instruments and charts, Blue Hill has been developing a way for residents to help with new data collection. Facilities head Don McCasland described a citizen science program that would let people collect and add weather data to a central database. Visitors such as Annie Hayes said seeing how observers collect data can make climate science feel less like a mystery, and Hayes said she planned to start using her family’s rain gauge later in the summer as part of the program.