Leveraging Field Campaigns as Educational Resources

Measurements form the groundwork for much of meteorology. However, student engagement with instruments is often limited. At the graduate level, exposure to instrumentation can be achieved through a student’s required research activities. At the undergraduate level, this is harder to achieve, as undergraduates rarely have the opportunity to conduct expensive research. Furthermore, undergraduate studies are limited as function of curriculums as well as limited logistical and financial resources. Student class time is limited, and students are often juggling multiple classes. Instruments are expensive, and many are designated for research purposes, so access to them during the normal course of a college semester is even further limited. Additionally, the physical scale of many instruments is such that they just can’t be brought “into” the classroom. One way to engage students with instruments is through educational deployments, a process which requires extreme dedication of individual or small groups of faculty to their teaching mission, often at the expense of their research mission.

Recently we have experimented with leveraging on-going field campaigns to provide hands on instrumentation instruction. Through PI-engagement and site visitation, courses were centered around a specific campaign to give exposure to multiple instruments with the focus of a single goal. This technique was used twice. First in the Fall of 2018 with a course of students from the University of Wisconsin visiting the SAVANT field campaign in Illinois, and again in the Fall of 2019 with a course of students from the University of South Carolina visiting the CHEESEHEAD field campaign in Wisconsin. This presentation will discuss how this exchange was executed and thoughts on how it could be conducted again in the future.