Image Credit: NASA

Project: https://www.iseechange.org/

Climate change is a poorly understood phenomenon primarily because verifying its local impact on day-to-day weather patterns is highly difficult due to the scarcity of granular data. Fortunately, that is changing with the introduction of the iSeeChange Tracker app that first emerged as an independent online weather journal in 2012, but has now transformed in to a hybrid citizen science, social-media project. As a result of the partnership with NASA, local communities are now being empowered to observe record and contribute data on how weather and climate affect their environment.

Every time you notice a change in the weather or climate in your local area, you could easily record your observations through your smartphone and send the data to NASA, where researchers and environmentalists will analyze these ground-level changes and compare it with their observations coming through satellites in space. The collaboration through iSeeChange Tracker app between ordinary citizen scientists across the world and researchers at NASA will improve the data currently available on the trends in climate change. iSeeChange Tracker app would serve as a collective climate journal where citizen scientists like you can collaborate with research teams by sending in geotagged photos of the weather at your locality. These geotagged photos alongside the information on daily weather and atmospheric changes would significantly help us all understand climate change better.

The observations posted on iSeeChange Tracker by citizen scientists are highly diverse: from the blossoming of flowers to the unexpected migration of birds. The tiniest of changes in the environment are quickly documented. Some users post their own questions and speculations about the changes that they are experiencing and that often leads to further discussion and investigation that helps the scientific community learn more about the bizarre changes in the environment.

Data being sent in by community-based citizen scientists is a tremendous help in analyzing important aspects of the changes occurring in the environment, for example, things like early spring, flooding, rising temperatures or changes in landscapes are now more easier to record. Citizen Scientists using the iSeeChange Tracker app are therefore playing a central role in the data collection process. Your participation in this citizen science project would be of immense importance. Scientists at NASA use the data you submit to spot trends, find patterns and come up with solutions that might prevent the rapid threatening changes in the global environment.

iPhone and Android users can easily download the iSeeChange Tracker app for free. The app also comes with multiple language support.

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