34Education Extending the Science: Examples of Education and Community Engagement during NSF NCAR-Support Field Campaigns

Scientific field campaigns are often considered an essential aspect of the atmospheric sciences for data collection, instrumentation testing, and comparisons with computational models. In addition to being complex scientific, technical, and logistical endeavors, campaigns also present opportunities for collaboration, engagement, education, and training. Students and early-career researchers can be entrained into a unique research community, and project teams have the opportunity to develop deeper relationships with their collaborators and host communities through engagement activities, even before the field campaign takes place. In this presentation, we discuss a successful partnership between two teams at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR): the Education, Engagement & Early-Career Development (EdEC) center of excellence and the Earth Observing Laboratory’s Research Aviation Facility (EOL/RAF), which has led to impactful education and engagement activities during domestic and international field campaigns. By leveraging expertise in education, relationship building, and project management, EdEC and EOL/RAF have been able to develop resources and engagement activities unique to each field campaign, as well as provide support to the project team leading up to and during community engagement events. We will specifically highlight strategies and successful examples of meaningful community engagement efforts from a variety of field campaigns, share lessons learned, and demonstrate the power of partnership, both within project teams and with the communities where the field campaigns take place, to foster scientific literacy on locally-relevant topics and even inspire future scientists.