It was great seeing all of the data that students collected for the Urban Heat Island Intensive Observation Period in December 2024. I decided to look at some of the data using a graphing tool called Codap from the Concord Consortium. It is easy to use and makes some neat graphs fast.
First, I downloaded all of the surface temperature data from the GLOBE website for December using the ADAT system (Advanced Data Access Tool). There are other ways to get data from the GLOBE data base including the Vis system and API.
Second, I brought the data into Codap and clicked on map to map it.
It's great to see all of the students entering data. I would love to see more data west of the Mississippi River in the United States. I'll have to work on getting more students involved.
Then, I had to change the surface temperature data and anything else I wanted to plot on a graph to a numeric value.
Here is how the data looks by latitude.
Most of the observations were taken in the Northern Hemisphere. You can see that as we go north, the temperatures are lower. How does snow affect the temperature?
The font is a little small. I haven't figured out how to make it bigger yet. Dry ground is the left column, snow is the middle and wet is the right. I put the means for each surface condition so it is easy to separate. There are many fewer observations taken on snow than any other surface condition. Wet ground is, on average, about 15 C cooler than the dry ground. This may be due to the location of the observations too. There are many observations from Saudi Arabia for instance that are all dry and hot. Snow is slightly below freezing with the lowest surface temperature of about -10 C.
This was just a quick analysis of some of the data. I hope you are able to do a project for the IVSS (International Virtual Science Symposium) https://www.globe.gov/news-events/globe-news/-/newsdetail/10157/announcing-the-2025-international-virtual-science-symposium-ivss-theme
I'll leave you with this. It has been quite cold in the Great Lakes area where I live. I've made an ice rink in my backyard and here is a video of my youngest son skating on it.
