E-note Index    July 2007 September 2007

S'COOL E-note August, 2007

Greetings from the S'COOL Team! Welcome to Issue #18 of the S'COOL E-note.

Hi, we're the summer interns who worked at NASA on the S'COOL project this summer. We're part of the SPHERE research internship with Christopher Newport University, and worked with Lin Chambers for 8 weeks. Our names our Amy, Jon and Matt, and we have been working with all the satellite and ground observation data that S'COOL has received so far, so, we've been asked to write the Enote for this month.

We have updated several pages on the S'COOL website to make the information more accurate and also easier to use. We have created and updated three tutorials which are available on the tutorials webpage: about CALIPSO, CloudSat and data analysis. We've also done some work on the visual opacity, cloud type, and satellite comparison pages, and even updated the report form.

We have also been working with the satellite data trying to achieve a better agreement with the opacity data from your ground observations. The satellite does not see opacity the way we do, but rather it assigns a visual opacity number to each cloud layer. By changing the cutoff numbers for the satellite, we have gotten better agreement for the satellite opacity data and ground data. But we've also focused on making the descriptions of opaque, translucent and transparent clouds more clear for future observations.

We have also been updating the data analysis Excel file to make it more user-friendly and more effective. We've added more analysis features, such as charts of cloud configurations and a system to count instances of agreement between ground and satellite. Look for this file to be posted on the "Database" page shortly. You will be able to use it to analyze your S'COOL observations.

Another interesting feature that we helped to launch is a Google Earth™ file that will pinpoint the locations of all the schools that have submitted at least one observation to S'COOL. This gives you a better idea of the scope of the project, and also will allow you to see the footprint of the satellite in the area around your location. It will also allow you to find other schools by locating them on Google Earth™, and then using their lat/long to find their cloud data in the S'COOL database to see how it corresponds to your own.

The last thing we have been doing is making our own observations from the NASA Langley Research Center to get a consistent data set to compare to the satellite observations. We have been taking at least 2 observations a day and have been taking pictures of the clouds for comparison with the satellite data. We have also started taking pictures of our shadows to continue updating the opacity webpage and have started looking at days when the satellite had a near zenith overpass. These overpasses are especially important as they allow us to use the data from CALIPSO, CloudSat, and MODIS to compare to our observations and see how well they correspond.

Its been a pleasure to work with your data. See you next time!

The SPHERE interns, Amy, Jon and Matt