On Sept. 19, 54 members of the Louisiana Wing occupied predetermined points across New Orleans, opened a phone application, and waited for an orbiting camera to require them. Civil Air Patrol had never attempted the activity, a fact officials treated as innovation rather than as evidence that no one had previously put the incident command system in charge of a weather glance.
NASA’s PACE satellite — Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem — launched in February 2024 to study oceans and atmosphere from orbit. Satellites already see a great deal from space. Scientists still prefer that unpaid people in uniform stand underneath the pass and record observations within 30 seconds of one another, producing what the agency calls a “mosaic city.” Each volunteer is one pixel. NASA then stitches the pixels into a picture it can compare with the picture the satellite already took, a method of verification that would be cheaper if the pixels did not also require briefing, staging, and rank.
Capt. Krystal Swain, CAP’s PACE Precision mission director, said the New Orleans CAP-NASA PACE Pilot Data Collection Challenge “took more than technology — it took a willingness to step into the unknown and figure it out together.” The unknown was a countdown. Louisiana Wing, she added, showed “an incredible level of dedication” and members “were among the first to raise their hands,” which remains the organization’s most reliable instrument.
Incident Command, Applied to Weather
Swain and Capt. Jud Ergle organized members from eight squadrons under the same incident command system CAP uses to find missing persons and survey disasters. NASA has singled out that structure as one of the program’s greatest strengths and has published nearly as much on how the volunteers arrange themselves as on whether the clouds cooperated. The chain of command, at least, achieved useful resolution.
Teams deployed to five locations within five minutes of the overflight and one minute of their fellow units, a spacing that treats a city as a formation. They tracked PACE on the GLOBE Observer App, took coordinated instructions during a live countdown, and, at the designated second, recorded the sky. The operational product was 54 people looking up at once. Andy Sayer, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, project science lead for OCI atmospheres on the PACE mission, explained that researchers need to know whether each satellite pixel is a cloud and, if not, what sits underneath. Louisiana Wing supplied the underneath.
Cadets Discover They Are Data
Cadet 2nd Lt. Hayden Taylor of Tangipahoa Cadet Squadron said the day showed him that “the sky is not the limit. … It is just the beginning.” The sky was the entire tasking.
Cadet Staff Sgt. Tyler Thompson of Slidell Composite Squadron was “really glad I got to be part of a NASA mission” and found it “cool that the GLOBE Program values the data collected by people who aren’t actually part of NASA.” GLOBE — Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment — is the NASA program that asks the public to collect environmental data, a job description that already fit a cadet with a phone. Cadet Staff Sgt. Jaci Averhart and Cadet Tech. Sgt. Joshuah Turner of Slidell Composite Squadron recorded observations while 2nd Lt. Stephani Turner looked on. Cadet Airman 1st Class Colton Richard of Ascension Parish Composite Squadron aimed his device at the assigned portion of atmosphere. For thirty seconds, all of them were pixels with grade insignia.
Partnership, Measured in Headcount
Capt. Shannon Babb, CAP/NASA national coordinator, reported more than 3,500 volunteers engaged this year across all 52 wings and about half of CAP’s overseas units. Over four years the total exceeds 10,500 CAP members, plus about 45,000 aerospace education participants and classroom students — a volume of sanctioned looking-up that has begun to resemble a core competency. Results from the Aviation Weather Mission, in which volunteers tracked airplanes and the white lines behind them, were presented at the American Geophysical Union’s AGU25 meeting in New Orleans in December 2025. NASA encourages researchers who use the data to credit CAP in published work, ensuring the unpaid pixel receives a footnote.
Lessons from September are being folded into the PACE Precision Mission, which will ask squadrons to field teams of at least 10 on four weekends in spring 2027. Registration opens Jan. 1, 2027. Members who enjoyed occupying a map coordinate until instructed to observe will have additional opportunities to do so on a calendar already printed.