Community Blogs
Community Blogs
Included below is a feed of the latest blog posts created by the GLOBE Community. To view a tutorial on how to create a blog, click here.
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Let's talk about collaboration?
Collaboration is a way to share your research, measurements, and ideas with others that have similar goals and interests. Collaboration is about much more than just sharing data or sharing techniques, it is about leveraging the expertise of others with your own, and combining them into a "POWERPACK" of results.
During our current Phase II of the GLOBE ENSO Student Research Campaign, we are "Taking Data to the Next Level!" One way to maximize this effort is to work with other schools from around the GLOBE community to answer big questions regarding the ...
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Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
Investigation Areas:
SOIL MOISTURE - SMAP BLOCK PATTERN
PEDOSPHERE (SOIL)
Primary Audience:
TRAINERS
TEACHERS
STUDENTS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
Yesterday, I visited Bell Multicultural High School and Lincoln Middle School, which share a campus near my home. It was inspiring, and I saw good science teaching with students doing research experiments dealing with bioremediation of soils. In discussions, I found myself talking about GLOBE and the many aspects of what the Program offers.
Students were experimenting with plant uptake of soil contaminants and were planning to take water samples from the Anacostia River bordering the area where they had collected soil samples. Their insight into the soil could be greatly expanded ...
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Loosely defined, "Internet of Things" commonly referred by the acronym IoT, refers to systems of interrelated computing devices, machines, or "objects", provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human "assistance".
A thing, in the Internet of Things, can be a fridge with a barcode reader, person with a heart monitor implant, an elephant with a GPS collar, a house with light sensors for opening/closing the window curtains - or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an Internet address and provided with the ...
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How hot was August 2016? It was the hottest August in the last 136 years of modern meteorological record keeping?
On Sept. 12, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) posted its monthly analysis of global temperatures for August 2016. The analysis by the GISS team is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world; ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature; and Antarctic research stations.
"Monthly rankings, which vary by only a few hundredths of a degree, are inherently ...
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Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
Primary Audience:
TRAINERS
TEACHERS
STUDENTS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
Apparently the wind belts around the equator flip about once every two years. This past year, NASA found that the flip occurred much earlier than it expected. Watch the short video at this url to learn more about this phenomena and how it might be related to the 2015-16 El Nino event.
http://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-explain-unexpected-atmosphere-flip-wind-direction-2016-9?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=referral
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Have you been taking lots of GLOBE data for the El Niño Student Research Campaign? Now that you have all the data, what can you do with it?
There are lots of cool ways to make sense of your data by sharing your WATER STORIES via the H2yOu Project and El Niño stories via the Story Maps Project .
By analyzing your El Niño protocol data, you can develop stories that will tell the rest of the world how the El Niño phenomena has affected your area. Perhaps students in other parts of the world have collected data similar to yours.
You can also take your data and develop a project ...
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Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
Investigation Areas:
ATMOSPHERE
EARTH AS A SYSTEM
HYDROSPHERE
PEDOSPHERE (SOIL)
BIOSPHERE
Primary Audience:
TRAINERS
TEACHERS
STUDENTS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
Earlier this summer, scientists predicted about a 75% chance of a La Niña following the El Niño from 2015-2016. But now, a La Niña is most likely not going to happen, with a 40% chance as of September.
Last Spring, waters in the Pacific Ocean seemed to be cooling off. This is an indicator of a La Niña weather pattern. Scientists have now noticed that these water temperatures have been leveling off, thus decreasing the chance of a La Niña event.
The current ENSO period of neutrality will continue into the Fall.
Monthly sea surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 region of the ...
Posted in:
Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
Investigation Areas:
ATMOSPHERE
EARTH AS A SYSTEM
HYDROSPHERE
PEDOSPHERE (SOIL)
BIOSPHERE
Primary Audience:
TRAINERS
TEACHERS
STUDENTS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
April 2015: The why
“Jen, create a list of ideas for making GLOBE more visible in the United States that will engage GLOBE Partnerships, teachers, and students nationally.”
All right. I can do that.
My top ten ideas:
Number Ten - The Science Fairs. The last one on the list. My least favorite.
Of course everyone picks that one to develop. Of course.
Flashback to my pre-GLOBE years: My failure
Coming from an undergraduate degree in zoology with a dream to be an excellent teacher, I wanted science class to be about research. That is what students should be doing in ...
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GLOBE El Niño Student Research Campaign Webinar #10
Date: Weds. Sept. 21 st , 8 to 9 pm (EST) 12 to 1 AM (UTC)
To register, click here
Ready-Set-Go!
We have received permission to continue with the El Niño Student Research Campaign, so we are full speed ahead to another year of collaboration! This webinar will focus on exploring what scientists have already learned from their data collection and analysis about the impacts of the 2015-2016 El Niño worldwide. Then we will hear from two Thai students about the many ways in which the El Niño impacted their region. ...
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Mark Your Calendars!!!
The GLOBE ENSO Student Research Campaign will continue with Phase II. The official commencement of Phase II will be at the Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 8:00pm EDT (12:00 am September 22nd UTC). Please visit the WEBINAR page to sign up and join us in celebrating the beginning of another year of the ENSO Student Research Campaign.
Posted in:
Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
Primary Audience:
TEACHERS
TRAINERS
STUDENTS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
ALUMNI
Great News!
The El Niño Campaign will transition into the EL Niño Student Reserach Campaign.
The Campaign has been graciously extended for another two years. Which means more great data collection, and presentations from scientists, educators and NASA communicators.
The kick off webinar takes place Sept. 21 8pm EDT.
Sign up here
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I just came across a fascinating article titled " A Tale of Fire and Water- A NASA Scientist's Quest to Understand Rain in Africa ". You can see this article at this link:http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/IchokuRain/. You learn the story of a NASA scientist who grew up in southern Nigeria as a poor refugee child whose family was forced to flee their home because of a civil war that was raging in 1968. Not only is his story inspiring, but the use of various satellite data to explain Dr. Ichoku's research is really fascinating!
The article covers many decades of changing ...
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Most cloud observations, including those using the GLOBE Observer app and even many from satellites, focus on the surface of clouds. It’s also useful, however, to be able to look inside clouds, especially storm clouds, to be able to get a picture of what’s going on now, and what might happen next.
As an example, let’s look at Hurricane Joaquin, which was over the Caribbean in late September 2015. First, some ground observations from GLOBE overlaid on satellite surface reflectance data (below). On September 29th, the closest data point to the storm (center of image) is from Ramey ...
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I just came across an article that discusses the impact of the 2015-2016 El Nino on landslides in California. You can read it at this link: http://landslides.usgs.gov/monitoring/2015elnino/ncal.php.
How would you think that the El Nino impacted the incidence of landslides in that region? Historically it is the large winter storms that cause the devastating landslides in the Francisco area. What do you think causes landslides to occur anyway?
If you look at this website, you will learn about the different types of landslides and see records about how the El Nino conditions ...
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As you might know, NASA came out with a statement that July 2016 was the hottest month on record, ever! Since the 2015-2016 El Niño event began in October 2015, each month has set a new record for the hottest month on record. Even though we are currently in a period of neutrality, we are on the tails of an El Niño and quite possibly about to enter a La Niña.
"Since October 2015, every month has set a new global record for hottest temperatures. It coincides with an unusually strong El Niño Pattern which caused severe heat and drought across Southeast Asia, as well as raising ...
Posted in:
Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
Investigation Areas:
ATMOSPHERE
EARTH AS A SYSTEM
HYDROSPHERE
PEDOSPHERE (SOIL)
BIOSPHERE
Primary Audience:
TRAINERS
TEACHERS
STUDENTS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
I just read a fascinating article from National Geographic that was published yesterday entitled "How La Nina Could Affect the Spread of Zika": http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/will-la-nina-affect-the-spread-of-zika-/.
Before you read the article, stop and consider how the temperature and precipitation patterns in your local region changed as a result of the El Nino. In my area, the greater Wash., D.C. metropolitan area, we had warmer temperatures and more precipitation. Then consider how the change in weather patterns might impact mosquitos- which in my case would mean more ...
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Plants need light to grow. They also require nutrients. For tiny marine plants, called phytoplankton, those nutrients are often brought up from the ocean’s cold, deep waters to the surface by mixing. But this normal circulation gets disrupted during El Niño years, when huge masses of warm water—equivalent to about half of the volume of the Mediterranean Sea—slosh east across the Pacific Ocean towards South America. The change can have fatal consequences for phytoplankton in the eastern equatorial Pacific.
Here is the full story with associated images and video!
Posted in:
Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
Primary Audience:
TRAINERS
TEACHERS
STUDENTS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
Check out the latest and greatest images, from NASA, associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event.
These images that you will see show sea surface height anomalies with the seasonal cycle (the effects of summer, fall, winter, and spring) removed. The differences between what we see and what is normal for different times and regions are called anomalies, or residuals. When oceanographers and climatologists view these "anomalies" they can identify unusual patterns and can tell us how heat is being stored in the ocean to influence future planetary climate events. Each ...
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Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
US La Nina forecast: Snowy winter on tap for East; Dry weather to alleviate flood woes in South Central!
Check this out!
Posted in:
Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
10. El Niño Student Campaign Refresher and Update - Wednesday, September 21st, 2016 8:00 pm EDT (12:00 am September 22nd UTC)
In this hour-long webinar, participants will get a refresher on this campaign, and will hear from several GLOBE teachers who have been involved with their classes from the start of the campaign. We will discuss the need for ongoing data collection and share the current state of the ENSO cycle. We will have a NASA scientist discuss the current state of the ENSO cycle and what it might mean for weather conditions for the remainder of this campaign. ...
Posted in:
Field Campaigns:
EL NIÑO
Primary Audience:
TRAINERS
TEACHERS
STUDENTS
PARTNERS
SCIENTISTS
ALUMNI
COUNTRY COORDINATORS
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