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Right: Alabama GLOBE director Greg Cox instructs teachers in the use of a GPS receiver. Our excusion then continued to the Rostov Natural History Museum. We were treated to a private showing of the golden treasures from Tanis, a bronze-age city on the Azov Sea shore near Rostov. This city is noted as being the farthest northern ancient Greek city. We were amazed at the beauty of the collection. Also at the museum was a special collection on loan from St. Petersburg. We had our photos taken with Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev and President Yeltsin. These wax figures were so lifelike, they too were sweating in the Rostov summer heat! A note on the pictures: Each links to a larger JPG up to 1152 pixels wide and from 100K to 1.1M in size. Photo credit: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center Our bus then delivered us to the café near the university for lunch. We again sampled beef, pork and sturgeon with a cold cucumber soup. The GLOBE workshop then continued with an overview of remote sensing basics. Our afternoon also included a guided tour of the GLOBE website. Many of the participants, both Russian and American had not been exposed to such a sophisticated website. As Greg Cox lead tour of the site in the Rostov State University's Computer Center with the aid of their computer video projector, the participants were able to follow on individual workstations provided by the Center.
The bus picked us up at the end of the day and took us to "our place," the small estaurant we have eaten at almost every evening. The day ended with a cool breeze that foretold tomorrow's weather.
Day 5 began with a wonderful rain shower. As our bus arrived at the Instiute of Mechanics and Applied Mathematics, the rain was a perfect introduction to our discussion of the GLOBE atmosphere protocols. Unfortunately, this shower was too brief and did little to dampen the rise in temperatures later in the day. The Russian and American teachers taught each other atmospheric vocabulary words in their native language and we all shared a good laugh as we discussed the GLOBE snow measurement protocol, wishing we could actually sample such an event today. The cloudy "oblaka" skies soon turned to clear "yasno" and the day continued to warm. We also were introduced to the GLOBE land cover protocols. Using a Landsat thematic mapper image of the Rostov-on-Don region as a guide, we saw the fields around the Institute turn into pixels. We began to construct our land cover analysis tools using materials brought from America. The U.S. teachers were asked to bring two empty toilet paper rolls "uncrushed" on their trek to Russia. They and their Russian colleages were amazed that such a useful device as a densiometer for making canopy cover estimates could be make from these materials. The Russian and American teachers worked side-by-side constructing both the densiometers and clinometers from drinking straws, dental floss and metal washers. Who said trigonometry isn't fun??
We traveled to "our place" again for lunch this time. We enjoyed a Rostov version of borsh, mashed potatoes, meat balls and chocolate ice cream. Afer lunch our bus took us to the Rostov Botanical Gardens. This 1000 hectare garden is over 70 years old and served as our land cover and atmosphere training site. We divided into two teams and took off in different directions. One group made their way to a woodland area (MUC 1211) and shared it with a small herd of goats who did not seem to care that they were eating away at the ground cover before we could get an accurate percentage measurement. The second group found a grassland area (MUC 4212) near a small spring. The spring was a gathering site for many of the local Rostov residents who come to receive the blessing of St. Sophia at the spring. These Rostovites were intrigued by this strange group of Russian and American teachers using a GPS receiver to locate the center of their landcover 30x30 meter study site. We all regrouped on the steps of the Botanical Garden Administration Building to drink cold water and "kvas," a Russian drink made from black bread. A quick check of our U-tube thermometer in the instrument shelter showed a temperature of 37 deg. C (98.6 deg. F). This was the end of our 5th hot, hot day in Rostov!
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