Tag: NOAA

Whenever you’re out frolicking in a winter wonderland, why not take a frolicking break every now and then to measure snow depth for your friends at the Community Snow Observations project? Your observations will help them verify data obtained from satellites and other remote sensing tools, and also fill in both spatial and temporal gaps […]

Our oceans are vast, powerful and mysterious — and even after centuries of study, there are still many things scientists don’t know about our planet’s blue expanses. But the ocean affects all of our lives intimately, even those of us who live far from the coast. Oceans provide food for billions of people, shape weather […]

The curved arm of Cape Cod jutting out into the Atlantic with 560 miles of beautiful coastline hints at the Cape’s glacial beginnings and its vulnerability to sea levels, now rising as a direct result of climate change. A disappearing island, a lost clam shack and a Beluga whale found in landlocked Vermont were all […]

How do you get people to care about the invisible? Watersheds are difficult to see, except for those who are conversant with hydrology or topographic maps. As much a geographic concept as a landform, watersheds are unlike hills or valleys or plains in that watersheds do not have a shape that is familiar to us. […]

This post is based on the latest episode of our podcast, Citizen Science: Stories of Science We Can Do Together! In it, co-host Bob Hirshon and Caroline Nickerson discuss some of the inspiring citizen science work conducted under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Listen here: Citizen Science: Stories of Science […]

Wicked high tides, also known as king tides or astronomical high tides, are a natural phenomenon that occur several times a year in certain areas around the globe. In the Boston area, these events usually happen in March and October. This is when there is a full or new moon, and the Earth, Sun and […]

Your experience of climate change is likely different than that of your relatives living in another state, and probably even different than your cross-town friends. The dispersed nature of climate effects means that they can be felt differently across individual neighborhoods, even within the same city block. Seemingly mundane factors drive these differences: how much […]

We tend to think of famine in human terms. But animal populations also experience wide-spread hunger, and the hundreds of emaciated young seals and sea lions stranded on California beaches in the past year were a poignant example. Fortunately, a large team of citizen scientists at The Marine Mammal Center—an animal hospital and research institute […]