Ira originally trained as a middle school teacher and began his career in that role. However, noticing that many of his colleagues were not as well-prepared in Earth sciences as needed, he was driven to pursue an advanced degree in the field, deepening his expertise through formal education and personal studies. This led Ira into a faculty position with the SUNY Brockport Earth Sciences Department, where he eventually became Professor and Chair. Ira initiated the Everyday Weather Project, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded teacher professional development program, where he formed key connections with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Weather Service (NWS) Training Center, Dr. John Snow and Dr. David Smith, numerous NWS personnel, and particularly Dr. Richard Hallgren, then NWS Director, who guided Ira to move his work to AMS. At Brockport, Ira collaborated closely with Dr. Robert Weinbeck, a faculty member who was pivotal in the AMS Education program throughout Ira’s tenure at AMS. Dr. Weinbeck also helped maintain the crucial university partnership that enabled teachers to earn graduate credit for their coursework. The Everyday Weather Project was the precursor of Project ATMOSPHERE, the nucleus of the early AMS K-12 educational program. A major component of Project ATMOSPHERE was the enhancement of teaching effectiveness through leadership training and materials development.
Project ATMOSPHERE’s leadership was anchored by the Atmospheric Education Resource Agent (AERA) network, a cadre of AMS-trained master teachers who served as a vital link between educators in weather and ocean topics and the AMS Education Program. The materials development component of Project ATMOSPHERE included the creation and dissemination, often via the AERA network, of scientifically authentic, up-to-date, and instructionally sound learning and resource materials for teachers and students. Ira drew the greatest pleasure from creating resource materials, which included teachers’ study guides, his well-known WeatherCycler slide chart, numerous other learning products, Glossaries, videos, short films, and magazines.
The AMS Undergraduate Faculty Enhancement Program (UFEP) was conducted at the NWS Training Center in Kansas City, MO, in the summers of 1994 and 1995 (Geer et al., 2001). Many of the participants, including Dr. James Brey, then at the University of Wisconsin - Fox Valley, helped introduce the undergraduate-level Online Weather Studies course several years later. Brey succeeded Ira, and served as the AMS Education Program director from 2008 to 2016.
In the summer of 1994 the first two-week workshop of the Maury Project (now Project Ocean), was offered at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, providing teacher professional training on the physical foundations of oceanography, with graduate credits awarded by SUNY Brockport. Initial funding was provided by NSF, then by the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command and Office of Naval Research, NOAA, and the Maryland Space Grant Consortium.
In 1996, with support from the NSF, Ira launched DataStreme Atmosphere, a semester-long national teacher enhancement course on the fundamentals of weather and climate, with graduate credits awarded by SUNY Brockport. This initiative served as a precursor to the broader DataStreme program, which now encompasses courses on weather, ocean, and climate.
In 1999, partly as a long-term means of generating income in the face of declining grant awards, Ira launched Online Weather Studies, providing a semester-long, turnkey undergraduate introductory weather course to be licensed and offered by colleges and universities (Geer et al., 2001). The focus was on 2-year colleges, especially those not traditionally offering a weather course to non-science majors.
The pilot offering of Online Weather Studies (OWS) was a miracle of firsts for the Education Program! Until then, the primary learning resource for DataStreme Atmosphere had been a standard off-the-shelf textbook, but for OWS, the Education Program developed, published, and sold its own custom college-level textbook and lab manual as support material. However, by the time the pilot course started, neither the textbook or lab manual had been completed! Over the pilot semester, successive sections of that first textbook and manual were written by meteorology professors that Ira had lured away from their respective universities, laid out by hand, photocopied, and delivered just in time to the UFEP professors who were the first to license and adopt the course.
Thankfully, AMS was able to modernize both the book publication methods and the data dissemination mechanisms as course delivery technology evolved. Those textbooks and manuals quickly became national best sellers in the undergraduate geoscience community, supplanting the off-the-shelf textbooks hitherto used in the AMS teacher development programs.
Ira’s initial Project ATMOSPHERE laid the foundation for the subsequent AMS summer programs and DataStreme programs, as well as the revenue-generating Online Weather Studies course and the various offshoots that were to come later in the life of the AMS Education Program (Weinbeck et al., 2003; Brey et al., 2015). Teachers from as far afield as South Africa, Japan, Belize, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Norway, Australia, and Canada, would eventually participate in the AMS Education teacher PD programs, exchanging teaching strategies with US teachers. Ira also formed relationships with like minded international science colleagues, such as Malcolm Walker of Great Britain. He also provided guidance to Australian science educators who formed a program similar to Project ATMOSPHERE. In all his work at SUNY Brockport and at AMS, Ira showed a remarkable vision, drive and knack for relationships that made it all succeed.
- Indicates paper has been withdrawn from meeting
- Indicates an Award Winner