There exists an opportunity for you, the reader of this post, to participate in good old fashioned hardcore atmospheric science research. The name of the project is Cylcone Center. It is a new type of research methodology using crowdsourcing to perform most of the legwork. Yes, that means you end up doing the work and don't officially get any credit. However, you can spend as much or as little time helping with high level research as you want - anywhere from 15 or so minutes and up. There is so much data to go through there is effectively no upper limit as to how much time you can spend on this.
What is it? Your work will help improve best-track intensity estimates and morphologies of tropical cyclones across all basins of the globe. The brunt of the work is as follows. You will be shown a series of images. These images are infrared satellite images of actual tropical cyclones that occurred over the last 30+ years. The images are color coded in such a way as to make it easy for you to infer things like cloud top heights and temperatures. You will be asked a short series of questions about each image. Mainly, you'll be asked what type of morphology the tropical system in each image appears to be, and how intense it looks...all just based on a satellite image. The process is based on the Dvorak technique for analyzing TC intensity. You can examine just one storm (maybe 8 or so total images), or you can examine many more.
I helped with this a few years ago after it first started. I only did a handful of storms. I stopped because I thought they were bringing the site down/no longer asking for participation. Apparently they are back at it and want more data. You can do this anonymously OR you can sign up for an account to keep track of how many storms and images you have analyzed. More weight will be given to your work if you create an account, so that is an incentive to sign up. Again, the website is www.cyclonecenter.org. This project is actually part of a larger science module called Zooniverse.
Participate!
What is it? Your work will help improve best-track intensity estimates and morphologies of tropical cyclones across all basins of the globe. The brunt of the work is as follows. You will be shown a series of images. These images are infrared satellite images of actual tropical cyclones that occurred over the last 30+ years. The images are color coded in such a way as to make it easy for you to infer things like cloud top heights and temperatures. You will be asked a short series of questions about each image. Mainly, you'll be asked what type of morphology the tropical system in each image appears to be, and how intense it looks...all just based on a satellite image. The process is based on the Dvorak technique for analyzing TC intensity. You can examine just one storm (maybe 8 or so total images), or you can examine many more.
I helped with this a few years ago after it first started. I only did a handful of storms. I stopped because I thought they were bringing the site down/no longer asking for participation. Apparently they are back at it and want more data. You can do this anonymously OR you can sign up for an account to keep track of how many storms and images you have analyzed. More weight will be given to your work if you create an account, so that is an incentive to sign up. Again, the website is www.cyclonecenter.org. This project is actually part of a larger science module called Zooniverse.
Participate!
