Blog - Kevin Czajkowski

The urban heat island intensive observation period (IOP) this October yielded about 25% more observations than last year. I only look at surface temperature observations since that is the protocol that I developed (with help from others) and there are many other air temperature and cloud observations in the GLOBE database that are not part of the urban heat island IOP. This October there were a...

A video of me talking about the IOP is here: https://youtu.be/gAwHjoCJNe0 The GLOBE October Intensive Observation Period (IOP) for urban heat island had great data collecting from around the world. Data was collected by students at over 70 schools and 1471 observations of surface temperatures wee taken. A list of all of the schools is listed below. Here is a map and a picture from Earth...

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...

GLOBE Mission EARTH has posted videos in the NSF funded STEM for All video showcase. The NASA funded project I lead that fuses GLOBE projects with NASA assets put a couple videos in. Our video highlights students who chose STEM careers. Please take some time this week, May 5-12, 2020, to watch the videos. Please make a comment or vote for your favorite video.  Here is our project: GLOBE...

The GLOBE Urban Heat Island Student Research Campaign finished up the 2019-2020 campaign with observations from 254 sites in October with 6,688 surface temperature observations. In December, 4,248 observations were taken from 126 schools. Over 50% of the data was submitted in the last 2 weeks. This is a large increase from last year of about 150%. There are focus areas with many schools...

Do you want to learn how to take surface temperature observations? The students at the Toledo Public School Natural Science Technology Center (NSTC) show how it can be done in this short video.  https://www.facebook.com/globemissionearth/videos/2581539525466417/ December is the second month of Urban Heat Island Effect Research Campaign. Take as many observations in the month of...

We are kicking off the Urban Heat Island Effect campaign today with a heat wave in the eastern United States. Many record temperatures were broken today with highs reaching 32 to 35 C. 53 sites around the world entered data already today, October 1, 2019. You can see that most of the observations were in places of the world where it has been pretty warm. The coolest observation came from...

The Urban Heat Island Effect Campaign in October was the best start to the campaign that GLOBE has ever had. 89 schools entered surface temperature data. Some schools like Huntington High School in West Virginia entered a lot of observations. Thanks Mr. Sharpe. A list of the number of observations each school took are listed below. Now that so many observations have been taken, students can do...

It is here! The Urban Heat Island Effect/Surface Temperature Campaign for 2018-2019 will start October 1. I am so excited to be kicking off a new campaign. There are so many more schools and students participating that it is very exciting. The Urban Heat Island is a very current and timely research topic to study. This past summer there were heat waves in Japan, the United Kingdom and Europe...

This has been a great year for the Urban Heat Island/Surface Temperature Student Research Campaign. More schools and more students have participated than ever before. I posted a 7 minute "Thank You" video here on https://youtu.be/QPfmAbMrwE4 Youtube. Urban Heat Island is a growing issue worldwide. More than 50% of the population of the world lives in urban areas. Much of this growth has been in...

Spring is starting to spring in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere but not quite yet in others. The March observations period for the Urban Heat Island/Surface Temperature Student Research Campaign has started. Please take surface temperature observations in March to help out with the campaign. If you can, please take observations from two sites so you can compare the temperatures for them....

We are in the middle of our December observations for the Urban Heat Island Effect/Surface Temperature Field Campaign. 69 schools have entered 1323 observations. As developer of the surface temperature protocol I wanted to thank everyone who has taken observations. It is your data that will allow other students to create interesting research projects as well as providing a database for me and...

The Urban Heat Island field campaign October version turned out to be a great success. Many schools took observations and entered them onto the GLOBE website. Remember, we are looking at the urban heat island in the seasons, October, December and March. Forty-three schools entered data in the month of October. If you haven't entered your data yet, please do soon. You can see on the map below...

Having students collaborate on projects has been a great potential of the GLOBE Program. Through GLOBE Mission EARTH, students in Detroit, Michigan and Shageluk, Alaska interacted over the Internet. Their teachers worked together with GLOBE Mission EARTH to plan the exchange. Students from Randy Smith Middle School, Fairbanks, Alaska, Carol Scott. Thirkell Elementary School 5th grade,...

In the fall of 2016, the students in my Weather and Climate class, GEPL 4490/5490, at the University of Toledo developed projects based on El Nino. The students in class were give the task to look at GLOBE data from a part of the world in which El Nino has an effect. The students were also tasked to do research on El Nino and La Nina to see what it is.   The students looked at the...

Hi All, The Urban Heat Island/Surface Temperature Research Campaign was very successful this year. There were a total of 1306 surface temperature observations from 59 schools during the Urban Heat Island/Surface Temperature Research Campaign. Schools that have participated so far (I put the country the schools are in and the state for the schools in the United States): 21CCLC Newport...

Hi All, We are well into the Urban Heat Island/Surface Temperature Student Research Campaign. Data are coming into the GLOBE website from schools from around the world. To date there have been 43 schools that have uploaded data to the GLOBE website. As I am writing this, there are a total of 596 surface temperature observations taken and entered on the website from December 1 to December 14,...

Hi All, It is exciting that we started a new Urban Heat Island/Surface Temperature Student Research Campaign that was formally knows as the Surface Temperature Field Campaign. I wanted to get an email out before the campaign started, but I came down with a bad cold. 27 schools have taken observations and entered them on the GLOBE website. I know that many more of you have taken observations or...

The Surface Temperature Field Campaign has come to a close, but please feel free to keep taking surface temperature observations. I know that many of you and your students are still taking observations and you are planning your projects to present at science fairs as well as the GLOBE regional science fairs. The Surface Temperature field campaign ran through the first day of winter. In the...

This second week of the surface temperature field campaign has seem probably the warmest temperatures that we have seen in any field campaign in the eastern United States. I was at Ida Middle School in Michigan yesterday and the kids were outside in short sleeve shirts. The student was a little cold but it wasn’t terrible. Some years there is 200 mm of snow on the ground. We have had 26...

We have had a great start to our 2015 Surface Temperature Field Campaign. We are off to a quick start with 16 schools reporting since December 1, 2015. There are a number of other schools that collected data in November. I hope they are able to collect observations in December as well. Since November 1, 8 countries have reported data and 5 states within the United States. If we look at the...

December 1 to December 31, 2015 The GLOBE Program will host the annual surface temperature field campaign from December 1 to December 31, 2015.  This is a great opportunity to work as a community with schools around the world on a common research project. Students have used the surface temperature field campaign data to do research projects from fourth grade up to graduate students at...

There have been 28 schools that have entered data associated with the GLOBE Surface Temperature Field Campaign for a total of 782 observations. The number of observations for a school is in parenthesis. Al-Fath Secondary School at Abha, Saudi Arabia Brazil High School, Tinidad and Tobago (18) – Thank you Mr. Ali Camanche Elementary School, Iowa, USA Chartiers-Housgon Jr./Sr. High School,...

Hi GLOBE surface temperature enthusiasts. The first week of the GLOBE Surface Temperature campaign (plus a couple days) is over. I took at look through all of the data that has been submitted so far. The field campaign looks to be a great success again. I greatly appreciate all of your hard work. 17 schools have entered data so far from 4 countries.   The number of observations for a...

GLOBE Surface Temperature Field Campaign December 1 to December 31, 2014 The GLOBE Program will host the annual surface temperature field campaign from December 1 to December 31, 2014.  This is a great opportunity to work as a community with schools around the world on a common research project. Students have used the surface temperature field campaign data to do research projects. And,...

Now that the new year is upon us, we can take a look at the GLOBE Surface Temperature field campaign from December 2013. I think it went very well. Tens of schools and thousands of students participated. Valuable data was collected that students can use to create research projects. Here are the schools that have entered data so far. David Wooster Middle School, Connecticut Bellefontaine...

The cold weather this last month has led to Lake Erie developing ice cover. This past week, the temperature has been averaging about 20 F (-6 C). Even with temperatures in the 50s and 60s F (10 C to 15 C), ice has formed. See the Figure 1 below. As you can see in the picture, the ice on Lake Erie is broken up into things that look like islands. The wind blows the ice around and breaks it...

Storm Coming Across US If you live in the United States, you probably have heard of the snow storm crossing the country right now. There will be mountain snow in the Rockie Mountains, a potential for a blizzard from Nebraska to Wisconsin and then some snow to the Great Lakes states. The National Weather Service (NWS) definition of a blizzard is: "A blizzard means that the following...

The GLOBE surface temperature field campaign started this week with some record warm temperatures in the United States. Students in much of the United States enjoyed short sleeve weather for several days. Schools have started to post observations on the GLOBE website. The GLOBE website has been changed dramatically over the last year. The GLOBE Program Office will be adding all teachers in...

  Cologne, Germany We stayed in Cologne, Germany for several days. While in Cologne, we stayed with Dr. Karl Schneider, his wonderful wife Karen and children. They are always such great hosts. Their son Karl said that he played football. I assumed he meant soccer because the people in the United States are the ones that call the game soccer. The rest of the world says football. But,...

The newpaper article is below. Take a look. It was very nice of Sebastian to translate it into English. Getting from Switzerland to Cologne, Germany After our meeting with the teachers and student at the Alexander von Humboldt Gymnasium in Konstanz, Germany, we made our way up to Cologne, Germany so I could attend and present at the International Geographical Congress (IGC) meeting. I’ve...

August 19, 2012 We went to a glacier in central Switzerland. It is a tourist attraction. It was the most unsustainable tourist place I have been to in my life. Usually, at tourist places, they try to have you do things that preserve the site. In the United States at the parks, you are not allowed to take anything away. Dunes are protected at the parks that have dunes along Lake Michigan,...

August 16, 2012 Yesterday after we arrived in Frankfurt, we walked around the city. It is an amazing city. It is big enough that there is a lot of business but it is small enough that the streets are not clogged with cars. Maybe one of the reasons is that so many people ride bicycles. There were bikes everywhere. Sometimes the people walking have to be careful not to get run over by the...

I'm at the 16th Annual GLOBE Partner meeting. It is a great time to meet with old friends and make new ones. Kevin