I know a lot of my geek friends twitter. I have personally never seen a niche for this application in my toolbox. I am still overwhelmed by the world of facebook. But many science programs are making their appearance in twitter now. The Mercury Messenger project has a whole team twittering updates as this space probe slings through the gravitational force of Mercury and captures new data about this mysterious planet. I friended the crew through face book where they have general info. But they noted that twitter was where the live updates would happen.
Today I got a message about a snow depth project that will fit in nicely with our permafrost monitoring. It’s called the snow tweets project. I just may have to twitter for this.
Dear Colleagues:
[With apologies for any cross postings.]
Now we are entering the winter season (in the Northern Hemisphere), I wanted to remind you of the Snowtweets project that we have developed to enable users of Twitter to “tweet” snow depth from a known location. Snowtweets is all about encouraging specialists and non- specialists to make simple measurements of snow depth that can we can pick up from Twitter for our own data base and pass them through to a
visualization package called Snowbird (Adobe Air application available from our web site). Snowbird posts 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
Please feel free to join in and “tweet”. 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.Happy Tweeting!
Richard
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Dr. Richard Kelly
Associate Professor
President, Eastern Snow Conference
Department of Geography & Environmental Management
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1
Vox. (+1) 519-888-4567 etxn: 35451email: rejkelly@uwaterloo.ca
web: www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/u/rejkelly