About SkyScouts Club
The background, the safeguards and the details behind the kid-friendly pages.
What the club is
Sky Scouts began with young students observing daily weather through low-cost backyard stations. SkyScouts Club builds on that hands-on learning to connect weather science, environmental awareness and youth-led community action, with K–12 participation as the goal.
Three ideas guide it: Explore weather and climate through observations and journals; Protect the local environment through supervised projects; and let young people Lead: students propose ideas, share findings and organize activities with support from adult advisors.
How it started
The original project placed low-cost weather stations with students in Illinois and Colorado, monitoring weather and indoor and outdoor air quality. Students recorded daily changes in handwritten notes, drawings and photos and shared their reflections with classmates.
These are pictures of charts from the Sky Scouts poster, not live readings, and the differences shown are not a general accuracy guarantee.
Program roots
The Sky Scouts poster identifies the original program as an initiative of DPI’s Climate R&D Hub, part of the University of Illinois System. It credits student observations and collaboration among DPI and NSF NCAR researchers. SkyScouts Club builds on that program’s documented, hands-on approach.
Privacy & participation
This website has no sign-up forms, student accounts, advertising trackers, analytics or donation processing. Its buttons do not collect any information.
Participation inquiries should come from a parent or guardian. Children’s photos, personal details and the locations of home weather stations are only published with permission, and station locations are never shown.
Activities on the Try It! page are planned concepts, not scheduled events. Supervision and specialist support will be arranged for each activity. Links to other websites, such as LinkedIn, follow those websites’ own privacy practices.
The weather data
The explorer pages show archived readings saved by the original SkyScouts dashboard: Ishika’s station from Aug 6, 2024 to Feb 22, 2025, and Ansh’s from Sep 17, 2024 to Feb 22, 2025. Nothing on this site is live.
- Each day’s values are worked out from readings taken every 5 minutes, grouped by local calendar day.
- Days with fewer than 80% of their readings are left out. Wind is left blank on days the wind sensor recorded nothing at all.
- Rain is the sum of increases in the station’s daily rain counter.
- Indoor readings, UV, solar radiation and air quality are not shown, and no station location is published.
- After Feb 22, 2025 the archive kept only about one reading a day, at varying times, so that period isn’t charted.
Download the daily readings: Ishika’s station (CSV) · Ansh’s station (CSV)
Contact
For program inquiries, contact sharmaa@illinois.edu. Parents or guardians should make initial contact for students.