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

Abstract

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 information on data from land-based meteorological stations 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 contain 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 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 – that enrols the help of undergraduate geography students at Maynooth University, Ireland – to resolve some of the land-based station geolocation issues. To date, we have run two Geo-locate projects: the first in the 2017/2018 academic year and the second in the 2018/2019 academic year. Both iterations have been very successful with 1926 of the 2168 total candidate stations ostensibly resolved, which equates to an 88 % success rate. At the same time, students have gained critical skills that helped to meet the expected pedagogical outcomes of the second-year curriculum, while producing a lasting scientific legacy. We asked the class of 2018/2019 to reflect critically upon the outcomes, and we present the results herein; these results 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. We encourage other organizations to investigate the potential for engaging university students to help resolve similar data issues while enriching the student experience and aiding in the delivery of learning outcomes. This paper provides details of the project, and all supporting information such as project guidelines and templates to enable other organizations to instigate similar programmes.