NASA-IGLO Albedo Experiment

Over the course of three weeks in May-June 2008, NASA partnered with the IGLO (International Action on Global Warming) program of the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) in organizing a worldwide citizen science experiment designed to illustrate why it matters to Earth's climate if albedo changes. This "Albedo Experiment" invited science centers from about two dozen locations around the world to engage their citizens in coming together with white or light-colored materials to temporarily "color" some small portion of their local area so that it might be imaged by a NASA Earth-observing satellite. The satellite data captured during these overpasses was then compared to data from previous dates (where the land was not colored by the citizens) in order to illustrate the changes that are also occurring in the Arctic as white reflectors (snow and sea ice) are converting to dark blue absorbers (open ocean) due to the shrinking sea ice extent. For locations where cloud cover was permitting and the brightness of the area was discernable, side-by-side comparisons were developed in true color and each of the RGB bands and citizens were able to make qualitative measurements of the changes using the Image Composite Explorer (ICE) tool which is part of NASA's Earth Observatory.