Geo-locate project: a novel approach to resolving meteorological station location issues with the assistance of undergraduate students

Autor: Seán Donegan, Sasha Brown, Louise Sarsfield Collins, Caspar Menkman, Simon Noone, Niamh Cantwell, Michael Murphy, Caoilfhionn D’Arcy, Dick Dee, Rowan Fealy, Christopher Phillips, Alison Brody, Peter Thorne, Rhonda McGovern, Martha Coleman, Martina Roche, Padraig Flattery
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Geoscience Communication, Vol 2, Pp 157-171 (2019)
ISSN: 2569-7110
2569-7102
Popis: The Global Land and Marine Observations Database aims to produce a comprehensive land based meteorological data archive and inventory. This requires the compilation of available land-based station meteorological data information from all known available in-situ meteorological data repositories/sources at multiple timescales (e.g. sub-daily, daily and monthly). During this process the service team members have identified that many of the data sources contained stations with incorrect location coordinates. These stations cannot be included in the processing to be served via the Copernicus Climate Change Service until the issues are satisfactorily resolved. Many of these stations are located in regions of the world where a sparsity of climate data currently exists, such as Southeast Asia and South America. As such, resolving these issues would provide important additional climate data, but this is a very labour-intensive task. Therefore, we have developed the Geo-locate project enrolling the help of undergraduate Geography students at Maynooth University, Ireland, to resolve some of the land-based station geolocation issues. We have successfully run two Geo-locate projects, the first in the second semester of the 2017/18 academic year and the second in the 2018/19 academic year. Both iterations to date have been very successful with 1926 out of 2168 total candidate stations ostensibly resolved, which equates to an 88 % success rate. At the same time, students gained critical skills helping to meet the expected pedagogical outcomes of the second-year curriculum, while producing a lasting scientific legacy. We asked the class of 2018/19 to reflect critically upon the outcomes and present the results herein which provide important feedback on what students felt that they gained from their participation and how we may improve the experience and learning outcomes in future. We will be continuing to run Geo-locate projects over the next few years. Due to the success of the Geo-locate project we encourage other organisations to investigate the potential for engaging university students to help resolve similar data issues while enriching the student experience and aiding the delivery of learning outcomes. This paper provides details of the project, and all supporting information such as project guidelines and templates to enable this.
Databáze: OpenAIRE