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16 January 2004

Editorial: How Citizen Scientists and Students can
Monitor the Environment

Forrest M. Mims III

Have you ever wanted to begin an environmental monitoring program? This is certainly possible, but it is time consuming and can also be costly.

This satellite image of global ozone coverage is representative of the kind of scientific imagery and data that can be readily analyzed by serious students and citizen scientists. Click image to enlarge.

There's another way, for the web is bulging with high quality data about the environment.

You can find everything you want to know about hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards and climate.

You can download satellite images that depict haze, snow cover, photosynthetic productivity, temperature, fires, clouds, water vapor and the ozone layer.

You can find specific data related to your local or regional environment, including ultraviolet radiation, particulate matter, pollen and mold counts, and concentrations of ambient ozone, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide.

If you live in earthquake country, you can find enormous amounts of data ranging from historical seismic activity to the latest tremor.

You can study sky conditions using web cam imagery from all over the world.

The professional scientific community cannot keep up with all this data. That's where we can help.

Students looking for significant science projects and serious amateurs who want to do real science can begin to delve through the mountains of data on the web to look for patterns, trends, correlations and the like.

Many discoveries are waiting to happen.

Is there an association between UV-B measured by the USDA UV-B Network (http://uvb.nrel.colostate.edu/) and ozone measured by NASA's EarthProbe TOMS (http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov/)?

What are the ozone and UV-B trends for your region?

Why is there so much smoke over much of the world during summer months (http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/modisrr/recent2.php?agreed=false and www.nrlmry.navy.mil/aerosol/)?

Is there a relationship between long term dew point and rainfall?

Of course I could go on, but the point is made. Students an amateurs can provide a vital service by analyzing environmental data that overwhelms the professionals.

The best aspect of this strategy is that high quality analysis of data already on the web can result in papers worthy of publication in peer-reviewed journals of science. This will inform a wide community of scientists about your findings and provide you with the scientific credibility that will enable you to go much farther in science.

Best regards,

Forrest