Zooniverse

Over the last few weeks I have spent over ten hours on zooniverse.org classifying different types of storms. There were several categories that I put these tropical storms into, the categories being Eye, Embedded Center, Curved Band, Shear, and Other. Before I put each  storm into a specific category I chose which storm looked to be the strongest. Some of the storms were difficult to classify because they were in between two categories and others were unclear pictures. After choosing a category I matched the storm in question with a picture of the storm whose category I selected. Although it sounds like several tedious steps after a while I did not even have to examine each category or pictures but just knew beforehand where each storm belonged. Even with the experience some where quite difficult to classify and took longer than the rest. By the end of the ten hours I had classified several hundred storms at least. Some of the storms were recurrent but many others were new to me. I can now say that I can successfully classify storms from a satellite orbiting the earth. I noticed patterns and many of the storms were in the same place, mostly in the western hemisphere in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Gulf of Mexico and below. It was a very interesting topic to help scientists with and I am glad that I had such an interesting thing to research.