The CloudSat Education Network: Significant Collaborative Research Between Students and Scientists

The CloudSat Education Network (CEN) is the primary education and public outreach component of the CloudSat mission. Approximately 116 schools in 16 countries around the world participate in the CEN, and are recruited from schools in the GLOBE program. Students and teachers in the CEN make atmospheric observations of temperature, precipitation, and crucially, of cloud type and cloud cover amount (including photographs of cloud observations), using a modified GLOBE Atmosphere protocol as a guide for observations. CEN observations are taken coincident with CloudSat overpasses, providing coincident spaceborne- and student surface observations. This puts students and teachers participating in the CEN at the forefront of scientific research as directly contributing partners in a collaborative research endeavor. CEN participants make extensive use of the CloudSat/CEN webpage, which is the primary data entry portal for the CEN. Data collected from CEN students is analyzed by CloudSat scientists for quality control purposes, as well as for use in CloudSat-related research. The webpage also provides students with CloudSat overpass dates and times, as well as CEN-specific updates, and articles about CEN projects distributed through a quarterly newsletter. Besides the newsletter, active CEN schools receive periodic visits from CloudSat scientists, providing an opportunity for students and teachers to interact directly with the scientific community. Results from completed student research include an investigation of the effect of different amounts of cloud cover on locally-grown mushroom crops in Thailand, while CloudSat-directed research using student data includes an analysis of the CloudSat cloud classification algorithm using student-collected data as a ground-truth dataset. The results of this latter study are in the process of publication with participating students and teachers listed as co-authors.