NASA, through the S'COOL Project (Students' Cloud Observations On-Line) has collected a large database of student ground observations of clouds, with associated satellite cloud retrieval information from the CERES (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System)
instruments on the Terra and Aqua Earth-observing spacecraft. CERES is exploring how clouds affect the climate of the Earth. The student data are to be used as a ground truthing data set to determine how well the satellite instrument and algorithms are identifying cloud presence and properties. This project will utilize programming and statistics to investigate this matched dataset and attempt to draw conclusions about the validity of the ground and satellite reports. Students with programming skills and some basic statistics knowledge are needed to assist with this project.
