The Atmospheric Sciences Data Center (ASDC) at NASA’s Langley Research Center houses over 700 data sets related to Earth’s radiation budget, clouds, aerosols and tropospheric chemistry. These data sets were produced to increase academic understanding of the natural and anthropogenic perturbations that influence global climate change. The “Mentoring and inquirY using NASA Data on Atmospheric and earth science for Teachers and Amateurs” (MY NASA DATA) project has been established to systematically support educational activities at all levels of formal and informal education by reducing these large data holdings to ‘microsets’ that will be easily accessible and explored by the K-12 and the citizen scientist communities.

The microsets are being made available on the MY NASA DATA website (http://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov) with associated lesson plans, computer tools, data information pages, and a science glossary. The smallest data sets are in simple ASCII text format with no tools required. For intermediate users, instructions are available for loading the microsets into Microsoft Excel, and the IDL 6.0 Virtual Machine (RSI) is being used to make simple visualizations freely available. Most interestingly, a Live Access Server (LAS) has been populated with ASDC data holdings such that users can create custom microsets. The Live Access Server can provide images as well as text-formatted data for use with spreadsheets. Currently, parameters from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), the Surface Radiation Budget (SRB), Tropospheric Ozone Residual (TOR) and the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) are available.

An open source component of the website will enable practicing teachers or citizens to submit lesson plans or tools that they have created and/or utilized with the data for sharing with other users. Also, the project will be reaching out to the citizen scientist community, both as data users and a source for ideas. Most importantly, this group can serve as mentors to teachers within their local community, assisting with any initial concern over scientific data use in the classroom. National teacher workshops will also be held each summer for five years to help teachers learn about incorporating the microsets in their curriculum. Workshop participants will be asked to provide feedback to make the MY NASA DATA project most effective and user-friendly.