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The Norwegian and British Antarctic expeditions to the South Pole are often regarded as the height of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Using a team of five men and primarily relying on dog sledges, Roald Amundsen first reached the geographic South Pole on 14 December 1911. Just over a month later, a team of five men led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find a tent left by Amundsen.

The development of high-resolution weather forecasts, and immediate issuance of weather warnings requires a high coverage of local and upper-air meteorological observation data to proceed. Conventional weather observation networks have fostered these applications and the advancement in urban meteorology forecast for more than a century. Now, with the emerging trend in citizen science programs, numerous private-owned weather stations using commercial weather instruments are springing up around the world. And this fast growing coverage of observation data has become available to the scientific community.

In 2019, the University at Albany launched the Virtual Operation Support Team (VOST), a student-led, faculty supervised initiative whereby undergraduate and graduate students were trained in crowdsourcing information from social media. As a part of their training, the interns learned about data scraping, misinformation and misinformation management, and the most effective ways to search for, summarize, and present trends in social media data. The VOST also served to support New York State's Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES) through the development of social media summaries and after-action reports. The program has had five cohorts of students that tracked sixteen incidents, complied over 70 social media reports, and engaged in one real-time activation. In this presentation, from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Dr. Amber Silver provides an overview of the University at Albany's VOST program, including the benefits to both students and the community at large.

The WeatherBlur Program is a student-led non-hierarchical citizen science platform where your students can wonder, investigate, work with data and then act to make their community a better place! The National Weather Service in Gray, Maine has provided support for the WeatherBlur program for over a decade, supporting impactful K-8 student led investigations across the US. In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Nikki Becker of the National Weather Service leads the audience through the details of the WeatherBlur program and the incredible impact it's having on teachers and students alike.

In this talk presented at the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Dr. Victoria Slonosky discusses how citizen scientists around the world have been transcribing historical weather observations. Her project, the McGill DRAW (Data Rescue: Archives and Weather) is working with citizen scientists to transcribe the McGill Observatory weather records, which represent one of the best sets of historical weather in Canada. The complete original records are being transcribed, including variables such as cloud cover and weather symbols. Nearly 1.5 million data points have been transcribed by hundreds of users, with a core group of superusers becoming experts in historical climate observations.

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Dr. Becky Bolinger, Assistant State Climatologist for Colorado, presents some interesting results from CoCoRaHS Condition Monitoring reports. CoCoRaHS observers can enter reports describing how dry or wet their location has been, called Condition Monitoring reports. Here, she has gathered all the reports made during and after the 2018 drought across CO, NM, AZ, and UT and evaluated them compared to drought data.

We are thrilled to have an amazing line up of speakers for the upcoming Weather Band Citizen and Community Science Symposium. To give you a small sneak preview of what's to come, here are short biographies for some of our speakers. They are arranged alphabetically, with more to come in the weeks ahead. A huge thank you to all of our speakers, and don't forget to register for the event! 

Interested in becoming a CoCoRaHS volunteer or just want to know more about what it's like to be a volunteer? Watch this fun video from James Kendall, who shared his experiences as part of the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium.

Using soil moisture and rain/snowfall data, Peter Callen has come up with a system of rating each month's overall relative wetness/dryness on a scale from -2 to +2. In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Peter details how the months are added up for each year, and how he creates charts shows the monthly and yearly changes for the past 10 years.

In a partnership now entering its second year, the American Philosophical Society and two Philadelphia area schools are continuing the weather data collection and observations that were started by some of our country's great 18th century thinkers. During this presentation from Dave Curry and Alexandra Rospond, you'll find out how students are connecting past with present as they learn to collect accurate local synoptic weather data.

In this interactive talk presented at the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Jessica Taylor and Dr. Jay Welsh from NASA walk the audience through the ins and outs of the award winning GLOBE and CLOUD GAZE programs, including how to use the app, what happens to your data, and how you can see what's being tracked around the world.

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Craig Lowe shows how Bahamian Storm and Hurricane Interceptors came to be and what they do to assist The Bahamas Department of Meteorology and The National Emergency Management Agency with valuable information on active Weather Threats.

I was listening to the WeatherBrains podcast (Episode 806) and there was a discussing what constitutes a tornado outbreak and the fact that there is not a rigorous definition for the term outbreak. And I am not sure there is a need to define the term for meteorological purposes. But I wondered if I could come up with my own Outbreak Index to allow comparison and ranking of events that might be termed a tornado outbreak.

Did you know that snow can fall at temperatures above freezing? In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Jeff Uhlik describes the impact of community engagement through the Tahoe Rain or Snow project. The group is working to reduce inaccuracies in determining precipitation type by estimating the temperature of the rain-snow boundary, which is used in weather forecasts and hydrologic models. With help from Tahoe Rain or Snow weather spotters, they have been able to record evidence of snow consistently falling at above-freezing temperatures in the Sierra Nevada. This project is now expanding in 21/22 to include many parts of the Western US.

The 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium was a huge success thanks to its amazing speakers and enthusiastic attendees. Over 350 people registered for the event, which showcased nearly 30 speakers over two days of presentations. This was the first time that the AMS Weather Band has held this event, and it was a true testament to the high quality of citizen and community scientists, as well as to the programs that train and support these weather enthusiasts.

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Davyon Hill of the National Weather Service discusses how he has built and sustained a successful SKYWARN program even while transitioning to a virtual environment because of the pandemic. He also presents on spearheading his office's Belonging Inclusion Diversity and Equity team; and the impact that spotters have for their local communities both for public safety, and as mentors for youth from underserved and under represented communities. 

These two presentations from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium showcase the importance of community led science to make change. In the first one, Melissa Goodwin from AGU details the philosophy and case studies from the work of the Thriving Earth Exchange; a transformative program that puts community leaders at the heart of scientific projects.

Already an experienced chemist, with a doctorate and years of experience in the field, Keith Minor is now working on his PhD in geology/paleontology with Professor Ron Steel in the Dynamic Stratigraphy Working Group at the University of Texas at Austin.

It is generally pretty hard to get excited about the nuances of government bureaucracies and how they may, or may not, coordinate activities across various Federal agencies. But a major change has been underway over the past two years related to how meteorological services are coordinated in the government — and how they interact with the academic and private sectors, as well — that has the potential to make a real difference. It represents the first major administrative restructuring of the U.S. meteorological services enterprise in over five decades, and it elevates meteorological services to the highest levels of government, including the White House.

An important key to improving weather forecasts, especially short-term forecasts on regional scales, is increasing the amount of observational data that can be assimilated into the computer forecast models. While remote sensing from satellite and radars continues to be enormously important, direct measurements from instruments such as those making up a weather station, called in-situ measurements, add great value.