What Ingredients Lead to a Successful Pre-College Student Chapter of AMS

Concord-Carlisle Weather Services (CCWS) has been a Student Chapter of AMS since September 2010. Over these past nine years, we have often been asked what a high school AMS chapter does on a day-to-day basis, how we got our start, and what types of support are needed for the group to be successful. We are a high school club so the primary goals are social and educational. For CCWS, it’s all about making connections: connections between weather phenomena which are being taught and weather phenomena which are happening outside in the real world, connections between meteorologists and the community which they serve, between mentors and mentees, and of course, amongst members of CCWS. CCWS fosters these types of connections through doing projects, creating broadcast products and doing outreach presentations. Another organizing force has been attendance and presentation yearly at the Annual AMS meeting.

CCWS was formed in 2009 by two students who were passionate about meteorology and wanted to share their passion with other students. They were able to connect with their meteorology teacher who was himself an AMS member and they entered CCWS as one of the few pre-college student chapters of AMS. CCWS started building connections and engaging the community in weather science through broadcasts on both the school’s radio station, WIQH, and the town television station, CCTV as part of their meteorology class. Today, CCWS work is not directly affiliated with any class, it runs as a separate school club that meets once a week before school. The original faculty advisor has moved on to another school and a new faculty advisor took over in 2013. Despite these changes, club members continue to produce forecasts for TV and radio broadcast using data from both the National Weather Service and the school’s own Earth Networks weather station and have added social media platforms to our broadcast products. In addition to our day to day weather broadcasts, we have developed new projects each year and presented that work at AMS annual meetings as part of the pre-college education symposium. Project topics have included: how major weather events can be used as an educational tool, the use of a green screen in a high school class, and how weather balloons or a weatherfest event can be used as a community engagement tool.

In addition to our day to day broadcasts and larger projects, our members reach out through trips and speaker invitations to experts in the field, and spend many hours educating students within our high school and in our greater school system. The exposure to future mentors and ideas from the meteorology community we met through our trips and speaker events, and connections we have built through our outreach efforts to the younger students have been two of the keys to helping us survive and thrive as a club. By engaging younger students through fun projects and presentations, like designing an experiment to fly with our weather balloon, we both give them a little meteorology education as well as a peek into a club they may one day like to join.

Since its founding in 2009, CCWS has grown to over 25 members, expanded our broadcasts to over 5 forms of media, sent a weather balloon to the edge of space, presented over 10 posters at the AMS annual meeting, sent at least 1 student off to college as a meteorology major, been the feature of a TedX talk on passion in education, as well as prepared a joint talk with our former faculty advisor’s new pre-college chapter. Speaking of collaboration and AMS, two of the other keys to helping the club survive and thrive has been continued collaboration amongst the past and present faculty advisors and continued participation in the annual AMS meetings. The answer to the question of “how do I start my own weather club?” varies from school to school but we believe we can help a new club figure out some of the keys to surviving and thriving from our own CCWS experience.