The Cloudsat Education Network: Scientifically significant collaborative research between students and scientists

The CloudSat Education Network (CEN) is the primary education and public outreach component of the CloudSat mission. Approximately 116 schools in 16 countries around the world participate in the CEN, and are recruited from schools in the GLOBE program. Students and teachers in the CEN make atmospheric observations of temperature, precipitation, and crucially, of cloud type and cloud cover amount (including photographs of cloud observations), using a modified GLOBE Atmosphere protocol as a guide for observations. CEN observations are taken coincident with CloudSat overpasses, providing coincident spaceborne- and student surface observations. A preliminary comparison study using CEN-collected observations of cloud type during the period from 2007-2008 compared the observed cloud types to those retrieved using the CloudSat 2B-CLDCLASS product. In this preliminary study, there were 227 coincidental measurements between CEN schools and CloudSat overpasses, with an agreement rate of approximately 66% between the surface observers and satellite observations.