Cloud gazers

"I am happy to hear the news. Paying attention to the earth is as important as getting good grades," said Ting Ya-wen (丁亞雯), the principal at Zhongshan school. The school has the second largest climate observation facility in Taiwan.

Huang Kai-fu (黃凱夫), an earth science teacher at the Zhongshan Girls' Senior High School, said that students need to take real pleasure in their work if they are to be effective in making observations. "Identifying the different kinds of clouds is no simple matter. Formations change so quickly that it is hard to determine (what kind they are). Unless you like it, you will find the work frustrating."

According to Kirsten Liu (留毓寬), one of the TFG students still active in the project, she is able to use what she has learned to predict the weather. When speaking to the Taipei Times, she confidently predicted that despite the dark clouds hanging overhead, it would not rain. She turned out to be right.

Another TFG participant, Liu Lu-hang (劉綠杭), summed up the project as a mixture of science and the appreciation of nature. In the Chinese version of the S'COOL Web site, she writes "Every time when I look up to the sky, various questions would come in to my mind: How can cirrus be shaped like hair? Why do (Cirrocumulus) clouds sometimes

arrange themselves in such an orderly way? Why does the color of the sky at dusk or night differ everyday?"

Perhaps through a project like S'COOL, she will be inspired to find out.

More information about the S'COOL project can be found at asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/SCOOL/.