Montana Middle School Students Present at GLOBE Student Research Symposium in Alaska

Six 8th grade students from Ronan Middle School received an amazing opportunity to present their air quality research at the GLOBE Student Science Research Symposium at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks on April 24-25, 2023. 

Research Education on Air and Cardiovascular Health (REACH) participants Rayna Tonasket, Kailyn Marengo & Anastasia Hertz impressed judges with their project titled “How’s the Air ‘Round There,” looking for correlations between Air Quality Index and populations of all 22 schools present at the symposium.   

Anaka Hardy, April Uhrich & Loren Olson won an award for “Best Project Using Existing Data Sets” for their project titled “The Long & Lat of Humidity.”  Their project aimed at finding out whether a location’s longitude or latitude had a greater effect on its humidity. 

While at the symposium, these students were able to participate in several scientific studies as they helped GLOBE and NASA scientists collect snow samples, measure snow accumulation in the field while logging the GPS coordinates, and study Snow Data from past seasons to help predict when local rivers would “break up” from their winter freezes.  They were also able to tour the University of Alaska and the Museum of the North. 

Ronan was one of only two schools selected from the contiguous United States, as the other 20 were local to Alaska, including REACH participating schools from Palmer, AK and Fairbanks, AK. Congratulations to all students, way to represent REACH and your schools!