Historic Participation Data (2003-2013)

In addition to GLOBE's automated participation data system, the program also houses historical participation data from 2003-2013. The data in the table below represents GLOBE participation metrics collected prior to the current database and collection system. Keep in mind that the particular metrics tracked for historical data slightly differ from the current collection methodology and may not be suitable for direct comparison with GLOBE's current tracking system.
 

How to Interpret GLOBE Historical Data

The data below details the number of schools, teachers and students in the K-12 classroom setting. These participants both received NASA-affiliated GLOBE training and participated in data collection during years 2003-2011.

The GLOBE Program can confidently report the number of teachers trained by the GLOBE community each year, however, GLOBE can not determine the degree of student participation. This uncertainty is due to many unknown variables, for example, whether each GLOBE teacher is instructing a single classroom of students or is responsible for multiple classrooms. Due to these factors, exact student participation statistics may change over the course of the year.
 

Active Participant Definitions

In the previous GLOBE data system, the number of teachers and K-12 schools were based on active measurement reporting from a GLOBE school, and the number of counts for these two variables were based on active schools. To be classified as an active school, teachers needed to regularly report and upload GLOBE protocol observations to its databases.

Active measurements in the previous GLOBE data system differed from the current system and included parameters like site definition and metadata, such as the height of an obstacle near an instrument shelter. Additionally, many automated weather station measurements included in GLOBE’s current system are not included in the historical data counts. 

Keep in mind that if a school stopped submitting data to GLOBE, then the school and their teachers were no longer counted. For this reason, a direct comparison between GLOBE’s current database statistics and those gathered prior to 2013 is not advisable.

The number of participating students is estimated by assuming that teachers only work with one classroom of students, using 25 students as the average classroom size. Keep in mind that this approach results in a conservative estimate of student participation in the GLOBE Program, as such, the actual number of participating students may be higher than what is reported below. 
 

Table Outliers

The green cells in the table indicate a switch on 30 June 2012 to the current GLOBE database and new methodologies of metric gathering. The blue cells for fiscal year 2013 in the table indicate the migration of schools and teachers to the new GLOBE database. During this transition GLOBE counted every teacher that signed up for training to ensure information retention in the new system while advertising the count of all teachers in the system. In December of 2012 there was a large data transfer which  accounts for the anomalously large increase in numbers in 2013.