Snowbird: the #snowtweets visual explorer

Snowbird: the #snowtweets visual explorer Dear Colleagues: [With apologies for any cross postings.] We have been experimenting with using publicly available web media to engage community participation in measuring snow! And now we need your help, if you are interested. The Snowtweets project is all about encouraging specialists and non- specialists to make simple measurements of snow depth that can we can access through widely available web media. Snowtweets relies on users "tweeting" their snow depth from their local site through the Twitter website. We then pick up the "tweets" in our own data base and pass them through to a visualization package called Snowbird. Snowbird renders the snow depth on a representation of the globe (e.g. Blue Marble). We are seeking to use this information to help with our remote sensing and model estimates (and to provide a modicum of a public service). To participate, you will need to have a Twitter account (free) and start tweeting. To see the data you can download and fire up the Snowbird application. All you need to know about how to do it, and how to get Snowbird, can be found on our website: http://snowcore.uwaterloo.ca/snowbird In the northern hemisphere, snow extent is coming to it's minimum so in general, we do not expect significant numbers of NH tweets, except from the far north. In the S. hemisphere, however, we might be able to get the attention of people experiencing current snow conditions. Please feel free to join in and "tweet". At this time we would like to test out the system so the more the merrier! Our goal is to reach out to long-term participants (universities, schools, research centres, community/professional groups) who have an interest in contributing for professional/academic/educational reasons. The emphasis is on ease of use (Twitter can be accessed through the web including via mobile data devices) to get more people involved. If you have any comments or questions drop me a line! Best regards Richard ----------------------------------------------------- Dr. Richard Kelly Associate Professor Department of Geography & Environmental Management University of Waterloo 200 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1 Vox. (+1) 519-888-4567 etxn: 35451 email: rejkelly@uwaterloo.ca web: www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/u/rejkelly