From Weather Wizard to Cloud Man: Education and Outreach with a Fun Approach

The scientific community is well aware that to combat today’s problems we must educate the general public. How do we go about this though? Which age groups do we focus on? Where do we go? As Education & Outreach Chair for the Cornell AMS Chapter (CCAMS), I was tasked with doing my best to answer these questions and I believe we had a very successful year. The goal of this poster is to share all of the Education & Outreach events that CCAMS conducted over the past year and the steps we took to make sure those events were successful. My hope is that by sharing the plethora of events that we held, this will help those with ‘writers’ block’ about how to get started on meteorological Education & Outreach. Many of the events we held were non-traditional such as hosting a Kindergarten class field trip at Cornell, going to a local science center to perform interactive demos, teaching 8^th grade earth science classes, discussing space weather in a museum, etc. One of the stand-out events was helping a Kindergarten class use Cornell’s green-screen to film their own weather forecasts! By sharing these events and the planning leading up to them, the hope is that others will be able to replicate these events in their communities, furthering the necessary task of educating the general public—including the next generation—on meteorology and other important scientific topics of today.