Cloudspotting on Mars

Our first manuscript, "The Cloudspotting on Mars citizen science project: Seasonal and spatial cloud distributions observed by the Mars Climate Sounder" was published in a special issue of the journal, Icarus, "MRO: 16 Years at Mars”. MRO is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Mars Climate Sounder is an instrument on MRO" in 2023. It's open access, give it a read!. Or check out this summary from NASA Citizen Science The results show distinct populations of clouds --- clouds observed in similar spatial regions (latitude, longitude, altitude) during specific seasons --- and which populations are observed at different times of the year. The individual clouds, which can be made of dust, water ice, or carbon-dioxide ice, were identified by Zooniverse participants and aggregated with a machine learning algorithm (which we describe in the paper). We plan to build off of this publication with several more that study certain cloud populations in much more detail!