Cyclone Center has recorded almost 250,000 classifications from volunteers around the world since its launch in September 2012. We’ve had lots of feedback on the project and have recently made significant changes that we think will make the experience of classifying storms more rewarding.

Patterns in storm imagery are best recognized by the human eye, so the scientists behind Cyclone Center are asking you to help look through 30 years of images of tropical storms. The end product will be a new global tropical cyclone dataset that could not be realistically obtained in any other fashion. We have already found that the pattern matching by our classifiers is doing better in many cases than a computer algorithm on the same images – this is very exciting!

The biggest change to the site is that we’re now targeting storms for classification. We’ve shifted to a system where the whole community will work on particular storms until they’re finished. This produces useful data very quickly – and means we can classify timely and scientifically useful storms as needed. These targeted storms will change frequently as you help us complete each one. You can check a box on the Cyclone Center home page that will mean you get alerted when new targeted storms appear: we hope to recruit a horde of enthusiastic online storm chasers this way.

We’ve added much more inline classification guidance – gone are the days of clicking on question marks to get help.  For each step in the process, you will be shown information on how to best answer the question. We think this will give you more confidence in what you are doing and hopefully inspire you to do even more!

We’ve improved the tutorial and we’re providing more feedback as you go along – now instead of waiting for several images to see the “Storm Stats” page, you will immediately go there after your first image. We’ve also upgraded Cyclone Center Talk, which allows for better searching and highlights more of the interesting discussions going on between other citizen scientists.

All-in-all it’s a big change for an awesome project. Log in to Cyclone Center today and give the new version a try. Don’t forget to check the box to start getting alerted to new storms as they appear: this will be incredibly useful for the research behind the site, and means you can be the first to classify data on new storms.

[Visit http://www.cyclonecenter.org and see the blog at http://blog.cyclonecenter.org]