Ideas for GLOBE's Future Drawn from the 7-Year Experience of the CERES S'COOL Project

As the outreach portion of the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) project, the Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) project is of smaller scale and scope than GLOBE; but its aims and methods are quite similar. As a result, lessons learned from S'COOL since its beginnings in 1997 may provide useful ideas for the future of GLOBE. This is particularly true as the director of S'COOL has also been a GLOBE science principal investigator for the last year (leading the contrail investigation within GLOBE). This paper will discuss a number of lessons learned from the experience with the S'COOL Project, and will make some suggestions for the future of GLOBE based on that experience. It will include discussion of most of the important elements of GLOBE, including 1) teacher training: S'COOL recently conducted its 5th annual Summer S'COOL Teacher Workshop; 2) data collection: S'COOL is nearing 26,000 complete student cloud observations; 3) integration of scientific research with classroom teaching and learning: S'COOL promotes use of real, student-reported, scientific observations for use in the classroom and in student projects. S'COOL also makes scientific satellite data available and accessible to students and teachers; 4) use of data by scientists: S'COOL pursues a statistical analysis of student data which was requested and obtained for a specific purpose. The paper will also present some observations and ideas for GLOBE based on the author's year of experience as a GLOBE principal investigator.