34Education Increasing Student Understanding of Severe Storms in an Era of Climate Change: Online Interactives to Explore Observed and Projected Changes in Convective-Storm Related Hazards

Understanding and communicating the impacts of climate change, as well as the uncertainties surrounding potential impacts, presents challenges for scientists, educators, and others. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) report that in the first seven months of 2024, the United States experienced 19 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each; these events included 15 severe storm events. The 1980–2023 annual average for billion-dollar events was 8.5 while the annual average for the most recent five years (2019–2023) is 20.4 events.

How do the changes in severe convective storm events relate to larger environmental changes, and what can educators teach students about the types of evidence that supports linkages between increased severe storm frequency and climate change? To address these questions, UCAR’s COMET Program and Central Michigan University are collaborating to produce a series of online interactives that highlight current research on severe convective storms and the observed changes in storm-producing environments based on climate change.

Three interactives being developed explore how the occurrences of severe convective storms are being affected by climate change. In the first interactive, students will assess the background ingredients (surface temperature, upper-level temperature, and humidity) necessary for a storm to develop and use a visual model to observe how changes in these ingredients under historical and enhanced climate conditions affect storm severity and hazards (winds, hail, intense rainfall, lightning). In the second interactive, students will compare current and predicted hazard frequencies within multiple global regions to assess how environments favoring severe storms are changing and inform their own perceptions of risk. The third interactive will focus on information/media literacy and task students with evaluating social media posts about severe weather in a changing climate and crafting accurate responses to those posts that align with published sources of information about severe storms, climate variability, and climate change.

Through the interactives, students will have the opportunity to build awareness, connect to their own weather understanding or experiences, and gain an appreciation of their personal weather hazard risk by seeing how the frequencies and locations of impacts are already changing. The different interactives will allow opportunities to explore severe storms and hazards across various geographic scales. For example, the hazards frequencies interactive will support students in observing changes at large scales across different parts of the world. In the information literacy interactive, students will be able to access information at regional and local scales to view what the current science indicates about how severe storm hazards at a location might change.

The interactives are being tested initially by non-meteorology major undergraduates in Central Michigan University’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, with the goal of ultimately supporting similar university courses worldwide. Complementary work by the UCAR Center for Science Education will focus on developing teacher guides and supplementary materials to extend components of the interactives to high school and other audiences. In this presentation, we’ll provide previews of the interactives for participants to engage with. Once published, the interactives will be freely accessible to the wider atmospheric science education community via COMET’s MetEd website (meted.ucar.edu).