NASA ROVER, Tackling Citizen Science With Grand Challenges and Everyday Problems

ROVER is the Citizen Science arm of the NASA Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) Project. Since 2007, participants around the world have been making and reporting ground truth observations of clouds to assist in the validation of the NASA CERES satellite instrument. NASA scientists are very interested in learning how clouds affect our atmosphere, weather, and climate (relating to climate change). It is the clouds, in part, that affect the overall temperature and energy balance of the Earth. The more we know about clouds, the more we will know about our Earth as a system and citizen scientists are an important piece of that puzzle! As a ROVER cloud observer, all participants follow simple online tutorials to collect data on cloud type, height, cover and related conditions. Observations are sent to NASA to be matched to similar information obtained from satellites and sent back to participants for comparison and analysis. The supporting ROVER website houses a searchable database archiving all participant reports and matching satellite data. By involving Citizen Scientists in cloud observations and reporting we can gain a valuable set of data that would have been previously unavailable to science teams due to funding, manpower, and resource limitations or would have taken an unreasonable amount of time to collect. Reports from a wide range of Citizen Scientist locations are helpful to assess the satellite data under different conditions. With nothing more than their eyes and an internet connection participants provide a different perspective and analysis of clouds, adding to a more complete picture of what's happening in the atmosphere in which we live

Creating User-Friendly Tools for Data Analysis and Visualization in K-12 Classrooms: A Fortran Dinosaur Meets Generation Y

During the summer of 2007, as part of the second year of a NASA-funded project in partnership with Christopher Newport University called SPHERE (Students as Professionals Helping Educators Research the Earth), a group of undergraduate students spent 8 weeks in a research internship at or near NASA Langley Research Center. Three students from this group formed the Clouds group along with a NASA mentor (Chambers), and the brief addition of a local high school student fulfilling a mentorship requirement. The Clouds group was given the task of exploring and analyzing ground-based cloud observations obtained by K-12 students as part of the Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) Project, and the corresponding satellite data. This project began in 1997. The primary analysis tools developed for it were in FORTRAN, a computer language none of the students were familiar with. While they persevered through computer challenges and picky syntax, it eventually became obvious that this was not the most fruitful approach for a project aimed at motivating K-12 students to do their own data analysis. Thus, about halfway through the summer the group shifted its focus to more modern data analysis and visualization tools, namely spreadsheets and Google(tm) Earth. The result of their efforts, so far, is two different Excel spreadsheets and a Google(tm) Earth file. The spreadsheets are set up to allow participating classrooms to paste in a particular dataset of interest, using the standard S'COOL format, and easily perform a variety of analyses and comparisons of the ground cloud observation reports and their correspondence with the satellite data. This includes summarizing cloud occurrence and cloud cover statistics, and comparing cloud cover measurements from the two points of view. A visual classification tool is also provided to compare the cloud levels reported from the two viewpoints. This provides a statistical counterpart to the existing S'COOL data visualization tool, which is used for individual ground-to-satellite correspondences. The Google(tm) Earth file contains a set of placemarks and ground overlays to show participating students the area around their school that the satellite is measuring. This approach will be automated and made interactive by the S'COOL database expert and will also be used to help refine the latitude/longitude location of the participating schools. Once complete, these new data analysis tools will be posted on the S'COOL website for use by the project participants in schools around the US and the world

GLOBE Observer Data: 2016–2019

This technical report summarizes the GLOBE Observer data set from 1 April 2016 to 1 December 2019. GLOBE Observer is an ongoing NASA‐sponsored international citizen science project that is part of the larger Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program, which has been in operation since 1995. GLOBE Observer has the greatest number of participants and geographic coverage of the citizen science projects in the Earth Science Division at NASA. Participants use the GLOBE Observer mobile app (launched in 2016) to collect atmospheric, hydrologic, and terrestrial observations. The app connects participants to satellite observations from Aqua, Terra, CALIPSO, GOES, Himawari, and Meteosat. Thirty‐eight thousand participants have contributed 320,000 observations worldwide, including 1,000,000 georeferenced photographs. It would take an individual more than 13 years to replicate this effort. The GLOBE Observer app has substantially increased the spatial extent and sampling density of GLOBE measurements and more than doubled the number of measurements collected through the GLOBE Program. GLOBE Observer data are publicly available (at observer.globe.gov)

Students as Ground Observers for Satellite Cloud Retrieval Validation

The Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) Project was initiated in 1997 to obtain student observations of clouds coinciding with the overpass of the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments on NASA's Earth Observing System satellites. Over the past seven years we have accumulated more than 9,000 cases worldwide where student observations are available within 15 minutes of a CERES observation. This paper reports on comparisons between the student and satellite data as one facet of the validation of the CERES cloud retrievals. Available comparisons include cloud cover, cloud height, cloud layering, and cloud visual opacity. The large volume of comparisons allows some assessment of the impact of surface cover, such as snow and ice, reported by the students. The S'COOL observation database, accessible via the Internet at http://scool.larc.nasa.gov, contains over 32,000 student observations and is growing by over 700 observations each month. Some of these observations may be useful for assessment of other satellite cloud products. In particular, some observing sites have been making hourly observations of clouds during the school day to learn about the diurnal cycle of cloudiness

GLOBE Observer Data: 2016–2019

This technical report summarizes the GLOBE Observer data set from 1 April 2016 to 1 December 2019. GLOBE Observer is an ongoing NASA‐sponsored international citizen science project that is part of the larger Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program, which has been in operation since 1995. GLOBE Observer has the greatest number of participants and geographic coverage of the citizen science projects in the Earth Science Division at NASA. Participants use the GLOBE Observer mobile app (launched in 2016) to collect atmospheric, hydrologic, and terrestrial observations. The app connects participants to satellite observations from Aqua, Terra, CALIPSO, GOES, Himawari, and Meteosat. Thirty‐eight thousand participants have contributed 320,000 observations worldwide, including 1,000,000 georeferenced photographs. It would take an individual more than 13 years to replicate this effort. The GLOBE Observer app has substantially increased the spatial extent and sampling density of GLOBE measurements and more than doubled the number of measurements collected through the GLOBE Program. GLOBE Observer data are publicly available (at observer.globe.gov)

Response of anaerobic methanotrophs and benthic foraminifera on 20 years of methane emission from a gas blowout in the North Sea

Highlights • High abundance of active anaerobic methanotrophs in sediments of the blowout crater suggests adaptation to methane seepage within at most two decades. • Fast exchange processes in permeable surface sediments prevent sulfate depletion and probably methane-derived carbonate precipitation. • Methane seepage impacts isotopic and assemblage composition of benthic foraminifera. Abstract Methane emissions from marine sediments are partly controlled by microbial anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM). AOM provides a long-term sink for carbon through precipitation of methane-derived authigenic carbonates (MDAC). Estimates on the adaptation time of this benthic methane filter as well as on the establishment of related processes and communities after an onset of methane seepage are rare. In the North Sea, considerable amounts of methane have been released since 20 years from a man-made gas blowout offering an ideal natural laboratory to study the effects of methane seepage on initially “pristine” sediment. Sediment cores were taken from the blowout crater and a reference site (50 m distance) in 2011 and 2012, respectively, to investigate porewater chemistry, the AOM community and activity, the presence of authigenic carbonates, and benthic foraminiferal assemblages. Potential AOM activity (up to 3060 nmol cm−3 sediment d−1 or 375 mmol m−2 d−1) was detected only in the blowout crater up to the maximum sampling depth of 18 cm. CARD-FISH analyzes suggest that monospecific ANME-2 aggregates were the only type of AOM organisms present, showing densities (up to 2.2*107 aggregates cm−3) similar to established methane seeps. No evidence for recent MDAC formation was found using stable isotope analyzes (δ13C and δ18O). In contrast, the carbon isotopic signature of methane was recorded by the epibenthic foraminifer Cibicides lobatulus (δ13C −0.66‰). Surprisingly, the foraminiferal assemblage in the blowout crater was dominated by Cibicides and other species commonly found in the Norwegian Channel and fjords, indicating that these organisms have responded sensitively to the specific environmental conditions at the blowout. The high activity and abundance of AOM organisms only at the blowout site suggests adaptation to a strong increase in methane flux in the order of at most two decades. High gas discharge dynamics in permeable surface sediments facilitate fast sulfate replenishing and stimulation of AOM. The accompanied prevention of total alkalinity build-up in the porewater thereby appears to inhibit the formation of substantial methane-derived authigenic carbonate at least within the given time window