Hi GLOBE surface temperature enthusiasts. The first week of the GLOBE Surface Temperature campaign (plus a couple days) is over. I took at look through all of the data that has been submitted so far. The field campaign looks to be a great success again. I greatly appreciate all of your hard work. 17 schools have entered data so far from 4 countries.
The number of observations for a school is in parenthesis.
Sekundarschule Uzwil, Switzerland (2) – Thanks Markus
Shazar Intermediate School, Israel (12)
Al-Fath Secondary School at Abha, Saudi Arabia (2)
Princeton Middle School, West Virginia, USA
Pleasant Valley Elementary, Iowa, USA (4)
Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies, Illinois, USA (15) – 5 different sites
Otsego High School, Ohio, USA (3)
Main Street Intermediate School, Norwalk, Ohio, USA (20) – Thanks Marcy
Mohican School in the Out-of-doors, Ashland, Ohio, USA (8) – Thanks Susan and Steve
Chartiers-Housgon Jr./Sr. High School, Pennsylvania, USA (8)– Thanks Gary
Roswell-Kent Middle School, Akron, Ohio, USA (71) 6 different sites – Thanks Steve
Lakewood Catholic Academy, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (16) – Thanks Eilene
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA (10) – This is me and my students
Navarre Elementary School, Toledo, Ohio, USA (36) – 6 different site observed.
Monroe High School, Monroe, Michigan, USA (46) and (24) at Bowles Harbor (a nearby science center – Thanks Russell
Huntington High School, Huntington, West Virginia, USA (14) – Thanks Rick
Mahopac High School, New York, USA
Some errors that I have seen. Some students have rounded off their observations to whole numbers. Please include the first decimal in your reporting. Be careful to use Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. I noticed that some schools have entered their surface temperature data in Fahrenheit. Also, make sure that you are entering the time in Universal Time and not your local time.
If you are new to GLOBE, please do not stress over entering the data incorrectly. Even the most seasoned GLOBE teachers have made mistakes already during the Surface Temperature field campaign.
**Marcy Burns and the kids at Main Street Intermediate School may take the record for the most consecutive years in participating in the GLOBE Surface Temperature field campaign – 9 years. **
Here are some of the data plotted through the GLOBE visualization system. You can see on Dec. 2, 2014 that the temperature in Israel is much warmer than the upper Midwest of the US.
The weather in the United States has become warm compared to November. The cold air has stayed up in Canada this December. Most schools haven’t had to measure snow during this GLOBE Surface Temperature field campaign. Here is the snow cover from NOAA. There is more snow cover than average in Asia according to Rutgers Snow Lab.
Did you know that there is a 3-year drought going on in California? It is quite a bad drought at that. The Palmer Drought Severity Index gives an indication of how bad droughts are. You can see that most of California is in a severe drought. You can see in the radar image and infrared satellite image below. There are a lot of clouds and precipitation shown on the radar. You will see on the 500 mb map that the flow has become zonal, goes from west to east across the country. This type of flow will help storms come into the western US from the ocean and for storms to move across the US quickly. That is one of the reasons that there is snow moving across the Great Lakes and into the Northeast. This rain in California is not enough to stop the drought but it could help it some. You will see that there will be landslides in California as the ground gets more saturated. How might a drought affect the surface temperature?
The rain is associated with a storm system in the Pacific Ocean that is moving in. You can see on the surface map that the system is a low pressure system along a cold front. The rain is quite widespread.
