I had a chance to visit the GLOBE country Croatia recently (beautiful!) and was asked to prepare some training material on how to use GLOBE’s data retrieval systems – Vis and ADAT. In putting together the training material I wanted to do something that would give people a chance to try out the tools and do some analysis on their own.
Here’s the presentation on the Vis system with a couple of tasks you and/or your students could do if you’d like to check it out.
Here is the presentation on the ADAT system with a couple of tasks you and/or your students could do. This presentation also includes the data and instructions if you’d like to try the following analysis for tracking climate change using GLOBE’s air temperature data…
Recognizing that Croatia has been with the program since very early on, and they had recorded a large amount of data, I was curious to see if the air temperature data recorded by students in Croatia over the last 21 years showed any evidence of climate change. I used the ADAT system to retrieve the air temperature monthly averages from Croatia from 2000 through 2021. I then used a pivot table to calculate the average annual temperature in Croatia per year for the last 21 years, placed a trend line on the data and took a look. Out of curiosity, I found NASA’s data set for measured temperature change over the last 21 years and compared the two. See what you think:
Next I used ADAT to retrieve all of GLOBE’s worldwide monthly air temperature data in the 30-50 degree latitude band for the same 21 year period and plotted the results to see how it compared to the NASA data. See what you think:
What does the GLOBE data say to you? How is it similar or different than NASA’s global air temperature measurements? What factors might contribute to those differences? What conclusions do you draw? Where do you think the 2022 data will end up?
