Letter to the Community
Letter to the Community
16 June 2017
Dear Friends,
Here in Boulder, Colorado, the creeks are raging with water from the melting snow pack in the mountains nearby. Here I am testing water from the stream behind the Tony Murphy testing water in Boulder stream GLOBE Implementation Office. I hope you are all enjoying the start of the new season, summer or winter, wherever you happen to live.
We're in the final stages of our preparations for the 21st GLOBE Annual Meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, that takes place 30 July - 3 August. With weekly meetings that join our GIO staff with GLOBE Partner Scott Graves and his crew in Connecticut, it is all coming together! I'm sure it will be a wonderful meeting and I hope you'll be joining us. If you are interested in registering, or you have registered but not yet paid your registration fee, please be sure to do so by 05 July. After that there will be an additional $100 late fee (ouch) that we want you to avoid having to pay.
In addition to the many program sessions, student presentations, and learning activities, we'll be focusing on expanding skill sets. Not only will we be learning protocols for gathering data, but we also want to ensure that you know how to use the GLOBE mobile apps for entering the data. To that end, we'll be going over the use of the GLOBE mobile app for data entry of all GLOBE protocols, as well as the GLOBE Observer app that allows you to take both cloud observations, use the new Mosquito Tracker, and download that data too.
There will be a new element to the student research poster presentations this year. All participants will act as judges to cast votes for their favorite presentations. This will be a lot of fun on Monday evening. The field study sites are all excellent as is Outer Island, where the students will be enjoying a day to themselves, with help from a handful of adult guides. New Haven, itself, is a very interesting town, with a long history of intellectual discourse owing to the outstanding colleges and universities there. We'll be benefiting from the resources of Southern Connecticut State University and Yale University during our 5 days together.
For those of you beginning your summer school holiday, and also for those of you in the Southern hemisphere where the winter school year is in full session, I want to remind you that it is always good to be thinking ahead to the opportunities in store for you with GLOBE. We'll be announcing the location of the 2018 GLE at the Annual Meeting (pending funding), and then you can start thinking ahead for that. There will also be another International Virtual Science Symposium (IVSS) for all students --our fifth! The IVSS grows bigger and stronger each year and offers participants the rare chance to be part of a highly-regarded international science event.
For those of you in the U.S., next fall there will be another GLOBE Training Bootcamp, a chance for you to brush up on your skills and to increase your awareness of STEM Equity and Inclusion. There will be several Regional U.S. Science Symposia as well (pending funding), so start thinking ahead to those too.
Here's a photo of some of the students at the Pacific U.S. Regional Science Symposium held two weeks ago in Pasadena, California. These students look like they are having a great time and I know they learned quite a bit at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab that hosted the event.
Enjoy the summer, or winter, everyone but please do start to think about how you will prepare for the many GLOBE functions and opportunities in the months ahead.
Sincerely,
Dr. Tony Murphy
Director, GLOBE Implementation Office
tmurphy@ucar.edu