Middle School Students Create Their Own Contrail Length Protocol!

"Mrs. Houseal told me about an opportunity to meet a scientist and I told my friends and they wanted to join." Charlee Schuman, an 8th grader from Hoover Middle School in Waterloo, Iowa recalls how she first became involved in GLOBE. Charlee and her classmates Danielle Brackin, Kathryn Peterson, and Samantha Brilling met with Lin Chambers, GLOBE Atmosphere Scientist, over lunch early last fall. This meeting was part of the GLOBE ONE Field Campaign (www.globe.gov/globeone), which is an effort to partner students and scientists in performing scientific research.

Dr. Chambers is using satellites to learn about Earth's cloud cover, particularly cloud cover formed from contrails. Contrails are clouds created by jet airplanes. One hundred years ago there was no such thing as a contrail. Today, however, contrails are changing the amount of light and heat reaching Earth's surface in some locations. Dr. Chambers wants to use satellites to keep track of contrails and study their effects. The best satellite interpretation software available today can only find contrails that would appear 4 finger widths wide to a person standing on the ground. The GLOBE Program trains teachers and students to identify all contrails in the sky. These data help improve the satellite interpretation software so that someday contrails of a finger width or smaller will be detectable.

Hoover Middle School student Charlee Schuman performs GLOBE Soil Measurements

As Charlee and her friends listened to Dr. Chambers explain her research, they came up with questions of their own. One of the things that interested them most was the length of contrails. The protocol Lin has designed does not measure contrail length, so the four Hoover 8th graders decided to develop a contrail length measurement protocol of their own. "We thought it would be really interesting to try to do something no one else has," explained Charlee. So the girls developed a protocol and tested it with themselves and other Hoover students. Charlee explained that developing a good hypothesis and writing it in the correct format was the hardest part of the project. Testing and improving the protocol was the best part. "I've learned a lot more about the sky than I did in all three years of middle school. It's fun to be in the [Lunch Science] club. That is really fun. We all try together".

On May 12th 2005, Dr. Chambers and the students from Hoover Middle School had a video-conference to discuss the protocol that the students were working on. Dr. Chambers was impressed with their work and even discussed the possibility of integrating some of the students' work into her NASA Contrail Team's offerings.

When asked what she would want to tell other middle school students about GLOBE, Charlee said, "It would be fun for other students to try GLOBE. It is a good and worthwhile experience."