Community Blogs
Community Blogs
Discover how the GLOBE community is engaging in all things GLOBE through the community blog posts below.
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Wanted to post an update on new capabilities that are in the works right now...we hope to see these features coming out in the months ahead:
GLOBE Observer
1) We're working on the Hydrosphere protocols to add to the current set of Atmosphere protocols.
2) A new geofencing option is in test that will allow scientists to ask users to collect certain data at certain times and certain locations.
3) Quality checks for time and location
4) Improvements for people with visual impairments
GLOBE Website
1) Tracking measurements for individual students instead of all ...
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I thought October 5, 2021, would be a normal day. I sat in a diner with my family after school, scrolling through my email and sipping a mint chocolate chip milkshake. It had been two months since my NASA STEM Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) internship ended– or so I thought.
Suddenly, I received an intriguing email. The subject line read, “AGU Fall Meeting 2021 Abstract Status Notification.” I had forgotten that my Mosquito Mapping team submitted an abstract in the first place. Taking a break from my milkshake, I curiously opened the email:
“On behalf of the AGU Fall Meeting ...
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The robotics professor has been leading the development of a tiny wheeled robot called Iris, which could become the first uncrewed rover sent by the US to explore the Moon.
Iris has not been built by experienced engineers at Nasa or a large aerospace company, but by students at Whittaker's home institution of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh. The robot was recently secured to its lunar lander, ahead of a launch scheduled for 2022.
The project represents a dream come true for the robotics pioneer, whose work has spanned cleaning up nuclear accidents to building ...
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In the Toledo area, Dr. C and schools in the area focused on studying artificial turf versus grass soccer and football fields. Artificial turf was much warmer than natural grass. This is combining the GLOBE Urban Heat Island Field Study with research by Vasco Mantas from the University of Coimbra in Portugal and George Xian from the USGS Eros Data Center and the AREN Project with Andy Henry and Geoff Bland.
University of Toledo students using the AREN TerraROVER on the UT football field.
You can see that the artificial turf of the football field (called the Glass Bowl) and the ...
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Field Campaigns:
SURFACE TEMPERATURE
Investigation Areas:
SURFACE TEMPERATURE
Student Research Reports:
U.S. STUDENT RESEARCH SYMPOSIA (SRS)
MISSION EARTH REPORT
I find it hard to believe it’s been two years since GLOBE invited the community to apply to become part of a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Task Force! One of the most important recommendations made by the Task Force was the development and implementation of a DEI assessment survey that helped set up a baseline: we needed to become informed about the state of DEI across GLOBE, and we needed to hear from GLOBE community’s members about necessary resources to make GLOBE more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
To work on the assessment survey, a special committee assembled from ...
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
During the SEES internship, I got the opportunity to do data collection fieldwork. This required me to go around my neighborhood and take pictures of specific points that had been calculated using a Python notebook. Some of these points were in parts of my neighborhood that I’d never been to, despite being in my fourteenth year of living there. I even saw a pack of wild javelinas in a particularly remote spot! The task definitely took longer than I expected, but it felt good to know that I had contributed data that would actually help NASA scientists.
I also got to brainstorm my ...
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Investigation Areas:
EARTH AS A SYSTEM
MOSQUITOES
Primary Audience:
STUDENTS
TEACHERS
Student Research Reports:
INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SCIENCE SYMPOSIUM REPORT
MISSION MOSQUITO REPORT
Science is dynamic and keeps evolving from one generation to the next. Science concepts might remain constant, but their dynamics change with each discovery or innovation. The making of future scientists starts from the time a child joins the school and continues advancing throughout the K-12 education and into the university.
Education stakeholders in the country saw a gap in how science is taught in schools, especially K-12 education. The standards were not aligning with the current generation and there was a need to improve it to fit into the next generation standards. This is ...
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Did you know that clouds can both warm and cool our planet? Keeping an eye on clouds helps NASA study our climate. You can notice some of these changes by just looking at the clouds.
Here are some examples you might have already noticed:
Do all clouds cast shadows? Low thick clouds tend to cast the most shadows. The shadows show you how the cloud is blocking the light from the sun from reaching the ground. This is similar to you placing your hand in front of your eyes when it is too sunny. Your hand is blocking the light from reaching your eyes. This is the same as the ...
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Curriculum:
SCIENCE AND MATH
STEM
GLOBE Science Topics:
BACKYARD SCIENCE
CLIMATE
CLIMATE CHANGE
GENERAL SCIENCE
GLOBE PROTOCOLS
EARTH AS A SYSTEM
SCIENTIST SKILLS
Investigation Areas:
ATMOSPHERE
Primary Audience:
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
STUDENTS
TEACHERS
TRAINERS
Absolutely, says Ralph McNutt from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU-APL) in the US.
McNutt, with colleagues, has just published a detailed report that envisions a long-lived interstellar probe - a mission to the space between the stars.
Nasa's legendary Voyagers are travelling through this domain right now, but McNutt's probe would go further and faster and would expect still to be working 50-100 years after leaving Earth.
"Suppose this thing launched in 2036, and it got to the end of the nominal mission in 2086," he pondered. "That ...
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The weather has been really kicking up quite a bit of whacky weather in November. On November 2, 2021, the town of Kikonai in northern Japan’s Kokkaido prefecture set a record amount of rainfall of 2.2 inches (5.5 centimeters) in 10 minutes. Wow!! That’s a lot of rain in a short amount of time! You can see where the rainfall fell on the image below!
(credit: Extreme weather around the world amid COP26 - The Washington Post )
Meanwhile in Uzbekistan, it saw the worst dust storm in about 50 years! The dust finally settled on November 4, 2021 but ...
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Investigation Areas:
ATMOSPHERE
EARTH AS A SYSTEM
Image Credit: Jenn Glaser, ScribeArts
If the last mosquito season felt longer, or if mosquito bites seemed to hurt more than you remembered, you didn’t imagine it! Mosquitoes respond sensitively to changes in heat, humidity, and precipitation, and serve as buzzy, annoying sentinels of our changing climate. Here’s how mosquitoes are letting us know our climate is changing.
With climate change comes an increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events -- think of this summer’s historic heat dome in the Pacific Northwest, the wildfires in the western ...
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Coming into the NASA SEES Internship, I had only ever experienced science through a
one-dimensional lens. I always knew the results, experimenting just to prove existing
knowledge. This internship taught me to look outside the box and challenge my preconceived
notions to discover new relationships that exist on our earth.
Through our weekly meetings, I got to interact with guest speakers and my mentors who were
taking on various projects in the field of epidemiology. Inspired by one such meeting where Dr.
Chellappan used machine learning to predict the mosquito species in an ...
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For many of us within the GLOBE community, this is a joyful season with many celebrations around us. I was lucky to have the opportunity to share about holiday traditions with members from the GLOBE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group a few days ago. Not only was it interesting to learn about how my colleagues celebrate different holidays, but it was also exciting to find about common traditions among physically distant countries!
Reflecting on diverse celebrations around this time, prompted me to share about a special day that is taking place in less than a month: World ...
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
Para muchos de nosotros en la comunidad de GLOBE, esta es una temporada llena de alegría, con muchos festejos a nuestro alrededor. Yo tuve la suerte de compartir acerca de tradiciones y festividades de esta temporada con miembros del grupo de trabajo de Diversidad, Equidad, e Inclusión de GLOBE. Además de lo interesante que fue aprender acerca de cómo celebran mis colegas, también fue emocionante encontrar tradiciones comunes entre países que se encuentran físicamente distantes.
El reflexionar sobre festividades diversas en esta temporada, me motivó a compartir acerca de un día ...
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
Stratus clouds are one of the three main types of clouds. Remember that there are many types of clouds that fall into three main categories: cumulus, stratus, and cirrus. Using hand-motions , we would stretch out our hands as far out as we could to mimic a stratus cloud. There are stratus-type clouds at all three basic altitude levels. These are: stratus clouds (low level), altostratus clouds (mid level), and cirrostratus clouds (high level). When stratus-type clouds are present, your skies will most likely be overcast or the cloud cover is 90% or more. Note, there is a ...
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Curriculum:
SCIENCE AND MATH
STEM
GLOBE Science Topics:
GENERAL SCIENCE
GLOBE PROTOCOLS
Investigation Areas:
ATMOSPHERE
EARTH AS A SYSTEM
Primary Audience:
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
PARTNERS
STUDENTS
TEACHERS
TRAINERS
Have you ever wondered how NASA develops accurate models of the earth's surface from space? How do we know the topography of the planet, the behavior of the water cycle, or the changes to sea level? My experience with the NASA SEES Earth System Explorers virtual internship this summer gave me a glimpse into the process of how such data is collected, analyzed, and ultimately presented: remote sensing. The internship allowed me to empirically learn about the world around me through a combination of coursework, literature review, hands-on science, and collaborative research.
In ...
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Have you heard there is a new clouds project? It is called NASA GLOBE CLOUD GAZE. It is a merger of GLOBE Clouds and The Zooniverse online citizen science platform. A one-week pacing guide is now available!
Sky photographs are one of the most requested portions of a GLOBE Clouds observation. This is because there is so much you can do with them. Photographs give scientists the opportunity to be right there with you. Details within a photograph can be used to compare with satellite data, confirm dust or haze observations, and give insight to unique cloud types like ...
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Curriculum:
SCIENCE AND MATH
STEM
GLOBE Science Topics:
BACKYARD SCIENCE
CLIMATE
CLIMATE CHANGE
DATA INCLUDED
GENERAL SCIENCE
GLOBE PROTOCOLS
EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE
Investigation Areas:
ATMOSPHERE
Learning Activities:
ATMOSPHERE AND CLIMATE
News Topics:
NEWS BRIEFS
Primary Audience:
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
STUDENTS
TEACHERS
TRAINERS
Od 5. do 7. listopada 2021. održan je Regionalni GLOBE sastanak i to po drugi puta u online okruženju. To je dalo priliku uključivanja većeg broja učenika i edukatora iz GLOBE škola, što je zbog putovanja i troškova mnogo teže ostvariti kad su sastanci uživo.
Prvog dana GLOBE sastanka predstavile su se 4 hrvatske škole u okviru teme Dobrobit za okoliš: OŠ Valentin Klarin, Preko i OŠ Šime Budinića u Zadru, s prikazom pilotiramja projekta utvrđivanja prisutnosti mikroplastike u moru, zatim OŠ Dubovac s projektom "Tko je vidio krijesnice?" i OS Eugena Kumičića, Slatina s učeničkim ...
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Student Research Reports:
STANDARD RESEARCH REPORT
After digging through my sea of emails, I remember the thrill I felt when I received my acceptance into the NASA SEES Internship Earth Explorers- Mosquito Mappers. Realizing this would be the first time I experienced a program remotely, my mind raced with questions. What will it be like, being part of a research team? What if I mess up the registration process? What would research look like? Although I wasn’t sure what to expect of the program, I was eager to discover what experiences and challenges await.
The first task was to collect mosquito samples. Never did I expect such a ...
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Investigation Areas:
MOSQUITOES
Natural beauty increases through these clouds.
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Investigation Areas:
ATMOSPHERE
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