The CERES S'COOL project: Two years after first launch

The idea for the Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) project as an outreach and education element of the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) research program was conceived in late 1996 during a conversation with a middle school science teacher. The project was implemented in a series of increasingly developed test phases during 1997, as the launch of the first CERES instrument approached. After several delays, that first instrument, on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) spacecraft, was finally launched on Thanksgiving Day, 1997.

Since that launch, development and expansion of the project has continued, with expectations for launch of two CERES instruments into a polar orbit in mid-1998. That launch is now expected on July 28, 1999, and will finally give us global coverage of all our participating schools. In two years, the project has grown from a dozen initial test participants to over 250 schools now participating in 21 countries on all continents. It continues to grow through word of mouth, presentations at teacher workshops, and now increasingly through teachers who find it while doing web searches.

Participants in the S'COOL project are part of the CERES validation team. They provide ground truth measurements at the time the CERES instrument flies over their location, to be compared with the remotely-sensed retrieval of cloud properties. Quantities reported include cloud type, height, and fraction; information on contrails; temperature, pressure and relative humidity; and the state of the ground surface (snow/ice, wet, dry; leaves on trees or not). In addition, a comment area on the form serves as a catch-all for all kinds of interesting observations, including similes written by some classes to describe more exactly the clouds they see.

Several not totally unexpected complications with the CERES instrument and processing software mean that the CERES team has not yet reached the point of computing the cloud properties, a high level product at the end of the processing stream. However, progress is being made and we anticipate that we will soon be populating the S'COOL database with a large number of satellite retrievals for comparison with the students' observations.

The CERES instruments are planned to operate at least through 2006, and we plan to continue to operate and improve the S'COOL Project until then, providing motivational learning to as many students as possible.