DISCOVER-AQ

Description

DISCOVER-AQ is a NASA airborne campaign aimed at learning how to improve air quality retrievals from satellite. The EPO component leverages the GLOBE Program to engage students and teachers in the flight area with an ongoing, relevant, and authentic science and education project.

Lead Organizations

Langley Research Center (LaRC) 

Partnerships

DISCOVER-AQ involves teams from NASA LaRC, GSFC, WFF; UC Berkeley, UC Boulder, NCAR, UMBC, Penn State, Millersville University; plus many other collaborators. These partners have visited local classrooms, invited students to D-AQ ground sites and balloon launches, and participated in educational chats.

Metrics

340 students participated in live chats with the DISCOVER-AQ aircraft during the CA deployment in Jan/Feb 2013. Most were in CA, but students from as far away as NY and Chile participated.

Effectiveness and Impact

Evaluation findings and impact statements:

DISCOVER-AQ consists of a variety of elements (teacher PD, STEM engagement), and our evaluation includes a mixed methods approach including surveys and quantitative metrics, as appropriate.

340 students participated in live chats with the DISCOVER-AQ aircraft during the CA deployment in Jan/Feb 2013. Most were in CA, but students from as far away as NY and Chile participated.

GLOBE trainers participating in the TTT for CA provided excellent formative feedback which is being used to refine activities for the CA campaign (and will further be used for the final flight campaign in summer 2014 - location TBD).

Audience quotes:

A 4th grade class in the Bronx used the information from the chat to develop and work out a complex Airplane Math problem (http://mwmathsci.blogspot.com/2013/02/airplane-math-2.html).

We had two classrooms logged in at the same time: a high school Environmental Science class from Kingsburg, CA and middle schoolers from Punta Arenas, Chile (their teacher was one of our teachers who actually got to fly onboard the DC-8 over Antarctica during IceBridge and he has been extremely enthusiastic about participating in ASP missions since then). D-AQ were answering questions from both classes in the same chatroom. The ENVS class from California mentioned how they had made measurements of ozone on the ground near their school and how high it was. The teacher in Punta Arenas mentioned how they needed more ozone in the stratosphere and how they had high levels of UV radiation.

This is very interesting! We have one group from a place where human pollution makes bad ozone at the ground level, and one group from a place where human pollution destroys good ozone in the stratosphere!17:43:12

Kaitlin_P3B