Chambers received her PhD in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University in 1991. Her dissertation, advised by Fred DeJarnette, was the creation of a model to predict "radiation absorption and emission coefficients in thermochemical nonequilibrium flows."[5]
Career
Per her training, Chambers began at NASA as an aerospace engineer. Her work focused on atmospheric entry of spacecraft.[6]
Starting in the mid-1990s, she adapted her expertise in radiative transfer to atmospheric science. This included working on the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) project to study the effect of clouds on the Earth's energy budget, and the CALIPSO satellite mission to detect clouds and aerosols from space.[6]
In 1997, she founded the Student Cloud Observation Online (S'COOL) project, a citizen science initiative which engages young students in scientific observations of local cloud patterns, collecting that data for validation of measurements by the CERES satellite.[7][8] As of 2016, the S’COOL project had received more than 144,500 cloud observations from students in 77 countries, including multiple observations from ocean basins taken onboard transoceanic ships.[9] In March 2017, the project was merged with the GLOBE Program.[10]
In 2004, Chambers helped to start the MY NASA DATA project, with the intention of making earth science datasets accessible to K-12 teachers, students, and amateur scientists.[11]
^Hartung, Lin (1991). Nonequilibrium Radiative Heating Prediction Method for Aeroassist Flowfields with Coupling to Flowfield Solvers (Thesis). CiteSeerX10.1.1.45.3731.
^Chambers, L. H.; Alston, E. J.; Phelps, C. S.; Moore, S. W.; Diones, D. D.; Oots, P. C.; Fischer, J. D.; Mims, F. M. (2008). "The My NASA Data Project". Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 89 (4): 437–442. doi:10.1175/BAMS-89-4-437. ISSN0003-0007. JSTOR26216795.
