Director: International/U.S. Partnerships and Outreach/U.S. Country Coordinator: Dr. Teresa Kennedy U.S. Regional Desk Officer: Ms. Nandini McClurg GLOBE Learning Communities and School Networks: Dr. Sheila Yule Need Help? Contact the GLOBE Help Desk.

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U.S. Newsletter Posted: 30 September 2005 (Updated: 30 September 2005)

Number of U.S. GLOBE Schools: 10874 (as of 18 February 2005)

U.S. Partner Recommitment Process - Regional Report from GLOBE 9th Annual Conference GLOBE Learning Community Meeting Chief Scientist Report on Field Campaigns and Satellite Mission Updates Resources for Obtaining Free Satellite Images - Chief Educator Report EPA Award goes to U.S. Partner - GLOBE Stars/News Announcements Web site and Partner Administration Page Changes - Funding Opportunities and Toolkit Update

Dear U.S. Partners, Greetings! We have much to share with you! We hope that the information found in this newsletter is helpful to you as you recruit, train and mentor the GLOBE teachers in your service areas. Please let us know if you would like to see any additional information in future newsletters. We look forward to receiving your feedback and to facilitating your GLOBE efforts! Best regards, Teresa Kennedy, Director, International/U.S. Partnerships and Outreach Rebecca Boger, Deputy Director, International/U.S. Partnerships and Outreach Nan McClurg, U.S. Regional Desk Officer Sheila Yule, GLOBE Learning Communities and School Networks U.S. Partner Recommitment Process The Recommitment Process for U.S. Partners resulted in the identification of 130 Active U.S. Partners - 115 signed recommitment agreements and 15 new Partners have joined the Program this year! The Active U.S. Partner List will continue to be maintained on the Web site and, as promised, this year we will have the recommitment form and annual survey available to you online. These forms will automatically insert your Partnership data into required fields which should save you a considerable amount of time in regard to your reporting efforts. We will notify you by email in early December when these forms are available for use. Remember that in order to maintain your "Active" status with GLOBE, you must conduct at least one GLOBE workshop activity each calendar year. This includes any activities conducted by you that fall into the "Standard" and "Pre-Service" categories as well as the "Follow-up", "Conference" or "Recruit" categories. With activities that fall into the "Follow-up", "Conference" or "Recruit" category, please keep in mind that since you are not certifying your participants at these activities, you will not receive any teachers' kits for these activities. Here are the steps to post a Follow-up, Conference or Recruit activity: 1. Please log on with you Partner ID and go to your administration page. 2. In the 4th box marked "Workshop Administration", select the first link. 3. Select "Create a New Workshop". 4. Fill in the form indicating dates and place where the GLOBE follow-up session took place and choose a "Category" that applies to your activity. 5. Select all the protocols that you will cover. In the workshop detail section, please explain what you are hoping to achieve at this session and please mark in the "Comment" section that you are wanting to conduct a Follow-up, Conference or Recruit workshop. Remember to please keep in mind that you will not receive any materials, so you can skip that section. If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact Nan McClurg. Also, please take a moment to verify that you are listed correctly on the Active U.S. Partner List. If your partnership information is missing or is incorrect, please contact the U.S. Regional Desk Officer, Nan McClurg or call 1-800-858-9947 and we will correct the information for you immediately. Regional Report from the GLOBE Annual Conference, 31 July - 5 August 2005, Prague, Czech Republic Special thanks and congratulations should go to the 2005 Annual Conference Organizing Committee Members, Sponsors, and especially TEREZA for their hard work. The efforts of TEREZA staff, volunteers, teachers and students truly exhibited why GLOBE Czech Republic has been so successful - they have a strong community. The 9th Annual GLOBE Conference brought together GLOBE Country Coordinators and U.S. Partnership Coordinators, Education and Science Principal Investigators, GLOBE Program Staff, and others to address key education and science elements of GLOBE. A major focus of the Conference was regarding the "Next Generation GLOBE" (NGG). The three main aspects of NGG discussed were: (1) regional consortia (grouping of countries to collaborate on regional GLOBE implementation), (2) a projects-based approach to organizing educational and scientific activities, and (3) a "GLOBE Schools Network" (GSN), consisting of a network of active GLOBE schools that are integrated into specific scientific research projects. All conference presentations have been posted online. View all information about the conference. * An exciting component of the conference included a presentation by past GLOBE students who have initiated the GLOBE Alumni International Network. Encourage your past GLOBE students to remain involved in the Program and to join the GLOBE Alumni International Network! GLOBE Learning Community Meeting - Corpus Christi, Texas The first GLOBE Learning Communities meeting for U.S. GLOBE Partners took place on 12-13 September 2005. Participants attended from 19 states representing most sectors of the GLOBE community including the NASA network, State Departments of Education and state-based teacher organizations, HBCUs, Tribal schools, Hispanic populations, Schools for the Deaf and Blind, informal science education communities and university representatives. Components of the meeting included visioning, strategic planning, science connections to GLOBE including looking at student data, as well as alignment of GLOBE protocols and learning activities with State Standards using the Align to Achieve web site, a resource used by many Partners to assist in standards alignment. Read more about the details of the 2005 U.S. GLC Meeting and help us to plan the next one! Chief Scientist Report - Field Campaigns and Satellite Mission Update Dr. Peggy LeMone, GLOBE Chief Scientist There are many exciting events occurring in the GLOBE Community! Contrail Count-a-thon In recognition of Earth Science Week this year, the GLOBE Program and NASA invite you to join in a scientific exploration on Thursday, 13 October 2005, to observe the sky over your area and report on the presence or absence of contrails. Teachers, students, and anyone interested in helping to develop a better understanding of Earth are welcome to participate. More... NASA Satellites CALIPSO and CloudSat Ready to Join A-Train NASA satellites CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) and CloudSat are scheduled for launch on 26 October, 2005 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California, USA. The satellites will join two other NASA satellites, Aqua and Aura, plus the French satellite PARASOL, to complete the "A-train" of five polar-orbiting missions designed to study Earth's atmosphere, hydrologic cycle and radiation budget. The scientists from the two missions will look to GLOBE students to provide ground-based data on clouds, precipitation, temperature and aerosols. This information will be used to check the accuracy of the instruments on board the satellites. CALIPSO and CloudSat will provide, from space, the first global survey of clouds; featuring aerosol profiles and physical properties with seasonal and geographical variations. Together, these observations will evaluate the way clouds and aerosols are measured and interact in global models, ultimately contributing to improved predictions of weather, climate and the cloud-climate feedback problem. NASA's Earth Observing Satellites will do far more than acquire a three-dimensional portrait of the planet. They will create a wide, detailed, and evolving global mural of Earth's interactive systems. Just as space-borne observations cross many geographic boundaries, the CALIPSO and CloudSat missions would not be possible without their international mix of organizational partners and scientists from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, and the United States. For more information on how your GLOBE students can participate in these missions, contact Dr. Rebecca Boger at rboger@globe.gov or go directly to the mission Web sites listed below. CALIPSO: http://www-calipso.larc.nasa.gov and http://calipsooutreach.hamptonu.edu CloudSat: http://cloudsat.atmos.colostate.edu GLOBE Connections with CALIPSO and CloudSat GLOBE Students and Satellites Team up GLOBE Field Campaigns Around the World The African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis Project (AMMA) provides the opportunity for GLOBE schools to work with scientists to improve our knowledge and understanding of the West African monsoon (WAM). AMMA is motivated by an interest in fundamental scientific issues and by the societal need for improved prediction of the WAM and its impacts on West African nations. Many of the GLOBE measurements support this very important project. Countries involved in AMMA are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. For more information about how to become involved, please contact Dr. Rebecca Boger. The first international conference on AMMA will be held in Dakar 28 November - 4 December, 2005. See http://amma.mediasfrance.org for more information. GLOBE One is an agricultural field campaign taking place in Black Hawk County, Iowa that has been collecting data since the spring of 2004 from a variety of sources including participating schools, students taking part in GLOBE ONE field trips, automated weather stations, volunteers and specially-organized events. The main focus of the field campaign will transition from data collection to focusing on data analysis during the next couple of months in order to answer research questions posed by both the students and scientists. Visit the campaign Web site at http://www.globe.gov/globeone to learn more about GLOBE ONE. The GLOBE Urban Phenology Year (GUPY) project was launched recently in 11 cities in Asia, Europe, Africa and North America (Amman and Irbid, Jordan; Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Tokyo, Japan; Manila, Philippines; Bangkok and Korat, Thailand; Jyväskylä, Finland; Dakar, Senegal; as well as New York, NY and Fairbanks, AK, USA). Workshops on the budburst protocol were held and attended by GLOBE teachers and students. The GUPY Project aims to compare budburst data with satellite images across an urbanization gradient. The Madagascar Malaria Project is an exciting initiative aimed at learning more about malaria and finding ways to educate the community to assist in combating its spread. Madagascar schools, scientists, health department officials, government officials and others have given their support to this project to link GLOBE hydrology and atmospheric data with mosquito larval occurrence and identification. They will be joined by two teachers from Boulder, Colorado, USA, who recently travelled to Madagascar to participate in the project this year. Contact Dr. Rebecca Boger for more information about this project. In the context of environmental/Earth science education, the issues related to vector-borne malaria can be viewed as a unique opportunity for developing scientist/teacher/student partnerships that attack a real-world problem with the resources that only a widely dispersed network of participants, such as GLOBE students, can provide. Local identification of mosquito breeding/hatching sites is critical because mosquitoes tend to stay within roughly 1 km of their hatching sites. In developing countries, and particularly in Madagascar, it is entirely possible that GLOBE schools in remote locations could provide the only regular source of this type of data. Once the Madagascar pilot study is complete, plans are to expand to the continent of Africa and to other parts of the world. Malaria is a mosquito-borne parasitic disease that causes more than 300,000,000 acute illnesses and more than one million deaths annually, including the death of one African child every 30 seconds. GLOBE students and teachers in Africa have been involved in research to combat this scourge since shortly after GLOBE was introduced to the world. Beginning as early as 1996, GLOBE schools in Bénin used GLOBE protocols to relate air temperature and precipitation to the number of reported cases of malaria. At that time, these GLOBE students relied entirely on daily manually reported data. This effort, sponsored by the GLOBE program in Bénin, was presented by GLOBE students at the First GLOBE Atmosphere Symposium held in Cotonou, Bénin, in April, 2001. GLOBE PI Dr. David Brooks can answer questions you may have regarding Malaria. The Thailand Tsunami Study began shortly after the tsunami tragically hit South Asia in December, 2004. Thai GLOBE students are currently working with local scientists to monitor the ecological recovery of some coastal sites that were affected as well as assess changes in marine invertebrate species, water and soil quality, and local atmospheric conditions using GLOBE protocols across all investigation areas - Hydrology, Atmosphere, Land Cover/Biology and Soils. GLOBE Thailand will be holding a second Marine Hydrology Symposium in conjunction with next year's Annual GLOBE Conference 2006 scheduled to be held in Phuket, Thailand. Please note that the side of the island where the conference will be held next year did not experience any damage from the 2004 tsunami. New Resources and Tools for Obtaining and Using Free Satellite Imagery Free Landsat satellite data that encompasses almost the entire land area of Earth can be downloaded from the University of Maryland's Global Land Cover Facility Web site. These images are ortho-rectified and available in 1990, and 2000 editions (and sometimes 1975), and lend themselves well to use in the GLOBE Land Cover investigation, notably with respect to the new Land Cover Change Detection Protocol. However, the satellite data need to be processed before they can be used for GLOBE. A tutorial (in draft version) entitled "Finding, Importing and Making Subsets of Free Landsat Data" has been developed by Frank Niepold (GLOBE Teacher and Master Trainer, NOAA Climate Education Fellow and member of the Landsat Education Outreach Team at NASA GSFC). The tutorial guides the user through the process of downloading and processing these data and can be accessed here. In addition, developments in the MultiSpec software package have made for a more robust set of capabilities and more straightforward application to GLOBE activities. Details of how to download the latest version of the MultiSpec software are provided in the tutorial. Another valuable free resource is Google Earth. The tools on this Web site combine satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips. Fly from space to your neighborhood in seconds! Type in an address and zoom right in. Search for schools, parks, and even your GLOBE sites!! Tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings. You can also add your own annotations. To download a free version of Google Earth go to http://earth.google.com. In addition, Google Earth is offering educators the opportunity to obtain a free license to Google Earth PRO. For more information, contact Dennis Reinhardt, Google Earth Team Education Initiative. Also, Earthshots is an e-book of before-and-after Landsat images (1972-present), showing recent environmental events and introducing remote sensing. Earthshots comes from the U.S. Geological Survey's EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. EROS not only supplies GLOBE schools with Landsat images but they are also the world's largest archive of earth science data. USA PhotoMaps 2.75 is a helpful application that can also help you find and map locations. It downloads USGS aerial photos and topographic map data from Microsoft's TerraServer Web site and saves it on the users' hard drive. Additionally, users can zoom in on any number of areas, view the latitude and longitude lines, and take a closer look at any given photos that may be associated with waypoints. The 2.75 version is compatible with all operating systems running Windows 98 or newer. AmericaView (AV) is a nationwide program that focuses on satellite remote sensing data and technologies in support of applied research, K-16 education, workforce development, and technology transfer. AmericaView is administered through a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey and the AmericaView Consortium. The Consortium is actively working with the USGS and universities across the country to expand participation in the AV Program to all 50 states. Education and TCP Updates Dr. Sandra Henderson, GLOBE Chief Educator The second year that the GLOBE Program Office has offered the 3 part, mixed design TCP has just come to an end. We are very pleased with the participation and feedback received on our Professional Development (PD) model and use of GLOBE protocols to stimulate interest in student research and inquiry in the classroom. We now have 74 newly certified GLOBE Trainers from all over the U.S. as well as several international participants who traveled to Boulder to attend the U.S. trainings and learn about the U.S. PD model. Next year's TCP opportunities will be aligned with the initiatives associated with the Next Generation GLOBE and will be announced in the spring of 2006. Also, Many new educational resources are in development! The interactive online cloud protocol developed for use by GLOBE trainers as the primary audience, and for GLOBE teachers as the secondary audience, has received positive reviews as a useful refresher tool. It contains information linking the cloud protocol with the five essential features of inquiry put forth by the United States National Research Council and includes suggestions for classroom implementation as well. If you have not had a chance to use this resource, please do so and feel free to contact us with your thoughts and suggestions. Currently, we have two additional protocols (GPS and Digital Maximum/Minimum Temperature) under development using the same interactive format. We anticipate the release of these new resources in the fall of 2005. In the next few months, you can also expect to see the release of the new Atmosphere Investigation training slides. The slides will be very familiar to those of you who participated in the 2005 Trainer Certification Programs (TCP)! They are based on our professional development (PD) model and reinforce inquiry, classroom implementation, data collection, entry, and analysis, and give step by step instructions for each protocol. In addition, we have been creating an Elementary GLOBE unit consisting of a collection of books and classroom learning activities for grades K-2. The Elementary GLOBE unit includes five individual modules (books and activities comprise a module). The five topics align with GLOBE Investigation Areas - Earth as a System, Clouds, Soils, Water, and Phenology. All modules are being field tested in K-3 classrooms to ensure age/grade level appropriateness and are scheduled to be released in the spring of 2006. Look for upcoming announcements regarding all the new resources we have been working on! And, as always, please do not hesitate to contact me directly if you have any questions or concerns: sandrah@globe.gov. It is a pleasure to work with you all and it has been a real treat to meet so many of you over the past two years. Marcy Seavey Receives Award for Excellence Marcy Seavey of the Iowa Academy of Science has been a GLOBE Partner since 1999. Her partnership has trained over 300 GLOBE teachers and supports approximately 40 active schools each semester. Marcy also serves as the Director for Iowa Implementation for the GLOBE ONE Field Campaign. Recently Marcy was honored for outstanding work and contributions to the field of environmental education. She was named the Environmental Protection Agency's Region 7 Environmental Educator of the Year. Please join us in extending heartfelt congratulations to Marcy for this well-deserved recognition! GLOBE Stars/News Announcements We would like to highlight your special GLOBE events as well as any GLOBE activities that your teachers and students would like to share with others. Many times these stories provide ideas and inspiration to other schools, teachers and Partners. Please help us acknowledge these events by writing up your news and sending it to us with photographs of the event. We do not have the manpower to create the entire article of your special event from your notes and comments. You can help us by creating a draft article and submitting it with a few photographs. Please remember that all pictures must have a completed release form in order to be posted on the GLOBE Web site. Click here to download the picture release forms. Your finished article should be emailed to Nan McClurg. Hard copies of completed release forms should be sent to: GLOBE STARS Photo Release The GLOBE Program P.O. Box 3000 Boulder, CO 80307-3000 USA We would like to bring to your attention some of the stories and news events that have been posted on the GLOBE Web site since the fall 2005 newsletter: The GLOBE School for Environmental Research, Region 2 (East Bronx), New York City (08-SEPT-2005) The Eratosthenes Experiment (07-SEPT-05) Over 100 schools from approximately 30 countries are participating in this project! More... Language Study Around the World (05-MAY-2005) Please share with us how your teachers are using GLOBE for language study. More... PAEMST 2004 Recipients (26-APR-2005) GLOBE Partnership in Hawaii (25-APR-2005) National Environmental Education Week 2005 (04-APR-2005) Results of the October 2004 Earth Science Week Contrail Count-a-Thon (24-FEB-2005) GLOBE Partner and Teachers Present at IGARSS Conference (24-FEB-2005) GLOBE Web site and Partner Administration Page changes The GLOBE Program Evaluation for Year 9 is now available on Partner's Corner, under the link, "Program Evaluation". The Year 9 Evaluation was made available in June, 2005, and the 134-page document includes Program Growth, Partner Study, Materials Study and Student Outcomes. Partner Administration Page changes include a link to all GLOBE Trainers and Master Trainers. This allows you to look up GLOBE Trainers around the world and see what protocols they are trained in. If you need assistance for an upcoming workshop and choose to recruit a trainer from a neighboring country, you can do so through the contact information available at this link. When posting a workshop on the Partner Administration page, you are now prompted to identify who will be conducting the training. This feature allows you to keep a record of the complete history of all your workshops. Funding Opportunities During the regional meetings at the Annual GLOBE Conference, the participants shared sources of funding for their national programs. We are currently creating a Funding and Marketing Toolkit to assist you with your fundraising efforts. A component of this toolkit will contain a list of successful funding obtained by our Partners as well as information that can be used when assembling proposals that include GLOBE. Please complete the online survey that will be sent to you in the near future to provide information for this toolkit! Thank you! Also, for your convenience, we have created a link that provides you with current Funding Opportunities that may be of interest. The information at this link is updated continuously and more sites have been added to the list so check it frequently! We hope that this information is helpful to you as you recruit, train and mentor the GLOBE teachers in your service areas. Please let us know if you would like to see any additional information in future newsletters. We look forward to receiving your feedback and to facilitating your GLOBE efforts! Best regards, Teresa Kennedy, Nan McClurg, and Sheila Yule