Participate in the Calibration of Water Vapor Instruments

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The GLOBE water vapor monitoring project, led by GLOBE scientists David Brooks and Forrest Mims, is looking for schools to aid in the calibration of the instruments used in the Water Vapor Protocol. In order to participate, you need to be located near a site where other water vapor measurements are already being made. By participating, you will receive a free GLOBE/GIFTS water vapor instrument. You will also be helping the water vapor monitoring project address a major challenge of finding a way to calibrate large numbers of water vapor instruments. In order to aid in the calibration of instruments, your school needs to be located within roughly 50 km of a site where other water vapor measurements are already being made. There are currently two sources for sites that the water vapor team is considering using as calibration sources. These are:

1. The global network of AERONET sun photometers. The locations of these sites can be found at: http://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov/
2. Sites that use signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. A list of sites being used for this purpose, with longitude and latitude coordinates (in the United States and Canada), can be found at: http://gpsmet.fsl.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/get_site_info.cgi

It is certainly possible that there are additional sources of reliable atmospheric water vapor data. You are welcome to inquire locally about such sites and contact David Brooks about joint cooperative ventures.

For this calibration project, we ask schools to agree to take a series of simultaneous measurements (as detailed in the Water Vapor Protocol) with two or three GLOBE/GIFTS water vapor instruments. These measurements should extend over several months, including warmer months in the fall and spring, in order to include measurements made over a range of water vapor conditions. Ideally, measurements should be made two or three times during the day, as the sun rises and sets. It will be helpful, but not a requirement, to extend these measurements through a summer season.

At the end of the calibration project, participants will be allowed to keep one of the instruments. The others must be returned for distribution to other schools.

Note that there is no cost associated with participating in this project. Development and construction of the GLOBE/GIFTS water vapor instrument (which is physically nearly identical to the GLOBE sun photometer) is sponsored by the NASA Langley Research Center.

If you are interested in participating, please contact David Brooks at: brooksdr@drexel.edu