STEM Professionals Blog - GLOBE International STEM Network

Satellites can detect and collect a lot of observations in very short amount of time. It is simple to think that anything that is white in an image is a cloud. Well, not always.  Look at these beautiful images taken by the GOES 16 satellite of the recent "Winter Weather Bomb" that left a blanket of snow from South Georgia to New England on January 4, 2018. Click here and watch a loop of images from the GOES 16 satellite for January 4, 2018. GOES 16 Image taken on January 4, 2018 at 171720Z GOES 16 Image taken on January 4, 2018 at 201720Z       ...

The GLOBE Clouds team loves coming up with ways to help students and teachers identify clouds. I've been blessed to visit a number of 4th grade full inclusion classrooms and want to share my quick cloud ID and data collection activity outline! Anchor question: Do all clouds look the same, even from space? Goal: Students identify, collect and submit cloud observations by using their own notes and clues for each possible cloud type. Objectives: Students will, (A) Recognize that clouds are part of the water cycle. (B) Investigate cloud types by their appearances...

The journal Scientific American just published a blog about GLOBE. The post, titled "The GLOBE Program: Making the Case for K–12 Citizen Scientists" discusses several aspects of GLOBE, including our contributions and campaigns. As well, it helps explain our mission of providing the resources for students across the world to become citizen scientists. "Contributing to global datasets not only gives students a chance to collect data that scientists can actually use, but allows them to compare their experiences and findings with other students around the world." To read more about GLOBE,...

Observations of daily precipitation have been a part of GLOBE from the beginning. At the start, GLOBE’s participation model was that schools would take measurement following all of the original 17 protocols. Atmosphere temperature, precipitation, cloud, and soil moisture measurements were to be collected daily at a site easily accessible to the school. A permanent installation of an instrument shelter containing a max/min thermometer mounted to a post along with a rain gauge was the expected norm with other measurements taken nearby. Daily temperature and precipitation measurements were to...

From the start, the measurement of daily maximum and minimum air temperature within one hour of local solar noon has been a key GLOBE protocol. The low cost approach was to use a U-tube thermometer housed in a wooden instrument shelter facing away from the equator. The U-shaped tube contained mercury with pins on either side of the mercury. As the air temperature warmed the pin on one side would move while the other pin stayed in place; when the air cooled, the pin on the other side would be pushed up. The pins were held in place by magnetized strips behind the thermometer tube so that they...