Blog - Kevin Czajkowski

GLOBE completed another great month of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) Intensive Observation Period (IOP) in March 2022. 107 schools participated and took a total of 1699 observations throughout the month. It is great to see more and more schools becoming active in this very important project. UHI is becoming more and more important around the world. Saudia Arabia, Croatia, Greece and Taiwan had...

The Urban Heat Island Effect Intensive Observation Period (IOP) has started. The weather in the Northern Hemisphere has started to get warmer as meteorological spring started March 1. There was an amazing weather situation where I live this past Saturday. You can see in the images on the left that I drove about 20 miles (32 km) from my house in Michigan to the Oak Openings Park in Ohio. There...

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...

It snowed at my house in Michigan last week, the first week of December 2020. I love snow and I really like to see how snow affects the surface temperature. Between 60 and 80 mm of snow was on the ground. I took surface temperature observations as part of the Urban Heat Island Student Research Campaign. I wanted to show what you could do by yourself at your house if you have an infrared...

Even with the pandemic, participation the campaign has been good. Although the number of schools participating and the total number of observations was down from last year, it was still a nice number of each. So far this fall (Northern Hemisphere) spring (Southern Hemisphere) there have been over 3,500 observations from 135 sites (70 schools) across the world. Please see the list below. There...