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...

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...

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...

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...