This is the Snowtweets project
Contribute to cryosphere research! Snow and cryosphere researchers at the University of Waterloo ask you to tweet snow depths in your area. Sign in to your Twitter account (or sign up, it's free!) and write a message that looks like this:
#snowtweets 2.5 cm at N2L 3G1
Just replace the snow depth measurement and the location with your own. Inches? No problem! We try to be flexible with spelling and abbrevations too, so don't worry. Your location can be a postal code, ZIP code, address or coordinates. In general, your tweet should look like this (without the brackets):
#snowtweets <depth> at <location>
We'll be using your contributions to help us verify satellite observations around the world. Want to know more? Have any quesions on how to do it? Here's a more technical description...
What's that image at the top of this page? That's Snowbird, our specialized Snowtweets viewer. You can also see your tweets in a web-based map or download a KML for Google Earth. Your tweet should show up within a minute or two from posting.
Any questions? Feedback? Contact us. We'd like to hear from you!
What is the Snowtweets project about?
The Snowtweets Project provides a way for people interested in snow measurements to quickly broadcast their own snow depth measurements to the web. These data are then picked up by our database and mapped in near real time. We are especially interested in using web-based digital technologies to map snow data; currently, the project uses the micro-blogging site Twitter as its data broadcasting scheme.
To view the snow depth measurements (or tweets), we have developed a data visualization tool called Snowbird that lets you explore the reported snow depths around the globe. The viewer shows where the reports are located and how much snow there is at each reported site.
The Snowtweets project is in early stages of development and we plan to update and improve it as we go along. We rely on user participation to measure snow depth (including zero snow depth) and then send the measurements in.
Please note that this project does not seek to replicate other existing community-based projects. Rather we aim to attract as many new contributors as possible through widely used web-media, such as Twitter, who might not be aware of these other projects.
What will we do with the data?
We currently have several approaches to estimating snow depth or SWE (snow water equivalent) at various spatial scales and with different accuracies. These include satellite remote sensing estimates and numerical simulation models. Testing these approaches needs data! This is where the Snowtweets data will come in handy!
We are developing quality control steps that allow us to determine how good the Snowtweets are. This does not mean that the data are wrong, necessarily, but we need to ensure that there is some consistency with: a) other tweets in the area, or b) if there are no other tweets close by, whether the temporal consistency of tweeting is good.
