Leading climate scientists will gather in the UK this week to finalise plans for a revolutionary project aimed at transforming their ability to predict meteorological disasters. The goal is to create an international databank that would generate forecasts of unprecedented precision.

The scientists' plans include:

■ Creating a global network of weather stations that would provide daily temperature readings for any spot on the planet. At present, only monthly readings are generated for the United States and Europe, while virtually no data is provided for much of Africa, the Amazon and Antarctica.

■ Digitising old sea logs – including those of the Bounty, the Beagle and Scott's Discovery – to build up a data set of historical weather patterns.

■ Persuading many countries that currently refuse to provide meteorological information to the rest of the world to open their data banks.

■ Seeking help from web companies and organisations such as Google and Galaxy Zoo to help volunteers decode data. In this way, meteorologists hope to transform their long-term forecasts.

"It is now very clear that humanity is changing the climate through the greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere," said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, one of the organisers of this week's meeting. "But we don't know yet, and what we really must find out is how those changes will affect a particular area.

"We need to answer key questions such as whether the onset of the monsoon in India will be delayed, how the frequency of droughts in the Horn of Africa is changing, or whether Europe will experience more severe heatwaves in future."

In recent months Moscow has been blanketed in smog from burning peatlands, a giant island of ice has splintered from Greenland and floods in Pakistan have killed about 2,000 and left millions homeless. Scientists believe that, as climate change takes an increasingly tight grip on the planet, more and more of these events will happen. They want to learn how to predict such occurrences and give vulnerable areas accurate warnings about potential catastrophes.

However, meteorologists are limited by the lack of data they receive from monitoring stations around the globe. Although there are more than 6,000 such stations providing data about temperatures, wind, precipitation and other variables, these only generate monthly averages for a particular locality.

The location of the world's key weather stations shows huge areas where information is not gathered. Photograph: World Meteorological Organisation

"We need to get daily temperature readings if we are going to make accurate forecasts," said Peter Thorne, of the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina. At the same time, swaths of Africa and Antarctica and much of the Amazon have no stations at all.

One of the aims of this week's meeting is to discuss ways in which daily readings could be generated by increasing the number of these remote, unmanned stations. It is intended to begin negotiations with countries that refuse to give out readings from weather stations on the grounds that such information could be sold. Simply opening these nations' data banks would double the information available to world forecasters.

However, it is the decoding and digitising of old logs from some of Britain's most illustrious sea voyages – a process likely to involve assistance from organisations such as Google – that promises to be of particular public interest. Throughout the 19th century and for many of the early years of the 20th century, Britain's navy ruled the oceans. Daily information about weather conditions recorded in logs gives an invaluable insight into climate patterns for these decades. Examples include the logbooks of the ships of the East India Company, which are held in the British Library, the logs of Royal Navy ships during the first world war, which are held in the UK National Archives, and those of the major Antarctic expeditions, which are currently being digitised by the Met Office.

"The problem is that the data is stored in old logbooks and it is an extremely laborious business to turn that information into digital form," added Stott.

However, recent developments on the web have provided precedents for providing help for such work. Three years ago Chris Lintott, an Oxford physicist, set up a website called Galaxy Zoo which asked the public to help classify photographs of a million galaxies. It has turned into the biggest citizen-science experiment on the web. Galaxies can be classified as spiral, elliptical or merging. However, with images of more than a million taken by astronomers, their categorisation – crucial for understanding the evolution of the universe – was daunting until Galaxy Zoo was set up. By logging on, members of the public can classify galaxies and have proved as good as, and in some cases better than, professional astronomers.

Now meteorologists hope that Galaxy Zoo, whose organisers have been invited to this week's climate meeting, can provide a model that will allow the public to help in the massive job of digitising the weather data left by sailors.

"We need not only to create climate data sets at daily or even shorter timescales, at a resolution of a few kilometres at most, but to generate data sets as far into the past as possible," said Stott. "That is why we are planning to take all these different approaches."