Impacts of the GLOBE Observer App 2016-2025

The GLOBE Program recently celebrated its 30th Anniversary on Earth Day, 22 April 2025. Ten years ago, work began to develop the GLOBE Observer app, and it formally launched in 2016 with the first tool, Clouds. The short video below goes through some of the key milestones for the app.

 

Among the accomplishments not included in the video;

• Seventeen data collection challenges, starting with the Spring Cloud Observations Data Challenge from 15 March to 15 April 2018, and most recently the GLOBE Eclipse Challenge: Clouds and Our Solar-Powered Earth surrounding the total solar eclipse on 08 April 2025
• Resources for each of the five tools (including Eclipse) helping observers learn how to collect data and the science behind it.
• Resources for informal educators in the form of the Toolkit for Informal Educators and guides for  libraries, Girl Scouts, and camps, and for families in the form of our At Home and Family Science pages, Clouds Family Guide and Trees Family Guide.
• The app is available in 16 languages, and we’ve translated other resources, especially into Spanish.
• Continual upgrades and improvements to the app, often based on user feedback, and new capabilities such as GLOBE Teams, in-app achievement badges, and the ability to request data collection in a specific geographic area.
• Data access resources and curated data sets, sometimes with added information supplementing what’s been submitted by volunteer observers, and some connected to the various publications using data collected via the GLOBE Observer app.
• We’ve published 225 news articles and science blogs, and featured profiles of 45 citizen scientists, researchers, and teachers or other educators.
• Numerous events, webinars, and social media posts and videos have featured work by scientists and volunteers with GLOBE Observer.

Join us for a GLOBE Observer Connect session on 22 May 2025 at 12:00 EDT/16:00 UTC for a conversation with GLOBE Observer coordinator Holli Kohl and deputy coordinator Kristen Weaver to talk about the accomplishments from the last nearly ten years. We’ll go over highlights from the last ten years, and answer any questions about the history and development of the GLOBE Observer app.

The progression of the GLOBE Observer app home screen from Clouds alone (2016), through the addition of Mosquito Habitat Mapper (2017), Land Cover (2018) and Trees (2019), plus the temporary Eclipse tool.
 

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