NASA Global Learning and Observations to benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Clouds is an international citizen science program that collects cloud observations from trained and untrained participants from around the world and compares them with satellite data. Originally known as Students’ Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL), a team of educators, programmers, and scientists have been collecting citizen science observations of clouds since 1997.
The new collaboration with the GLOBE Program has increased matches with satellite measurements to over 72,000 cloud observations, a factor of 14 increase since 2017. The Science Education Team also collects cloud observations from the GLOBE Observer app, a simple way for the general public to collect environmental data. On August 21, 2017, a special version of the app allowed people to report cloud and air temperature data for the 2017 Solar Eclipse. Over 19,000 cloud observations were collected and processed within the 24-hour period.
During this webinar, we will introduce NASA's GLOBE Clouds program, how the ground-based observations are matched with satellite data from NOAA GOES, Terra, Aqua, and CALIPSO satellites, the benefits and limitations of this citizen science data for scientific inquiry. We will also share a sneak peek of current work with neural networks and object recognition of cloud types with pictures submitted by the public.