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Stuck inside this winter? Try an at-home citizen science project
For many of us, it’s the height of winter, with harsh weather and the pandemic keeping us inside. If you’re looking for a new way to pass the time, why not help science?
Researchers from a range of disciplines rely on the power of crowdsourcing to collect and analyze data. From transcribing weather logs dating back to the Victorian era to classifying African animals caught by camera traps, here are just a few ways to put your free time to good use.
HOW TO HELP: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, has been monitoring the sun’s activity for more than a decade. Studying the sun’s outbursts, including the narrow jets of plasma that erupt from the surface, will help scientists better understand space weather and crack solar mysteries (SN: 12/15/21). But first, researchers need to find those jets. That’s where you and other armchair astronomers come in. Just go online, review sequences of SDO images, determine if solar jets are visible and document details about the events. In addition to helping scientists study the sun, the dataset could help create a computer program that could speed up future solar jet identifications.
HOW TO HELP: To put today’s climate change into perspective, scientists need a long-running record of global temperatures. That record is pretty good for the 20th century, but becomes spottier in the 19th century. To fill in the gaps, researchers are digitizing weather logbooks from ships that sailed in the mid-1800s. Anyone with an internet connection (and willing to read old-timey cursive handwriting) can help transcribe the wealth of data locked away in these books.
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