AIM - Education and Public Outreach

NASA Shar-a-thon: Satellite Missions and the GLOBE Program join forces to provide teachers nationwide with numerous resources and opportunities to participate in their missions, workshops, and data collection.

Discover an abundance of resources related to weather, climate, clouds, ozone, and data collection. Applications for future teacher workshops will also be available.

Abstract

Many people are unaware of the importance of NASA satellite missions and their continuing efforts to provide scientists with valuable data related to Earth as a System. Included in each mission is an education and public outreach (EPO) component that provides students nationwide with classroom resources and opportunities to participate in student data collection. Many of these missions offer students with an opportunity to collect ground-based data, which supports the data collected by satellites. The GLOBE program is a valuable partner in this effort, providing a central online database where students can enter their ground-based data and then make comparisons with additional data collected in 111 countries. Precise protocols are used for all data collected by students, ensuring consistency for scientific research. While some missions provide students with hand-held instruments, such as the sunphotometer provided by CALIPSO, other missions, such as CloudSat, utilize visual observations.