Measuring Weather Together: The Role That Personal Weather Observations and Mentoring Partnerships Play in Engaging Students in Meteorology

Sometimes observations and questions are more intriguing than answers. Especially for future scientists. We also believe that the meteorology mentoring pipe-line that has been so influential to us as high school students will be even more important to middle school students who look to teenagers for guidance. Meeting teenagers who are passionate about weather and science and are interested in collaborating with them may provide a boost of enthusiasm for them as they get introduced to weather in 7th grade.

Concord Middle School has just implemented a “Weather and Water” unit in the 7th-grade science curriculum, yet they have no instruments beyond thermometers with which to make first-person observations or track their local weather data. While the high school has a digital rooftop weather station, there is currently no ground based weather station despite every other Friday being dedicated to outdoor observation in meteorology class.

As part of this project, members of Concord Carlisle Weather Services researched and co-authored a grant with the middle school science department head to purchase instruments and materials to build two Stevenson shelters housing instruments, one to be housed at the middle school and one at the high school. Additionally we helped them to select a digital rooftop weather station to compare their data to. We also plan to build 50 backyard snow and rain collection devices so that middle school students have a chance to participate collaboratively with high school students in collecting and sharing data across our two towns and two schools whenever there is a significant precipitation event. We will seek out mentors from the NWS and CoCORAHS to teach us best practices and we will pass this along to our own high school earth science classes, AMS club members, and the middle school science classes through presentations and help videos. We will set up an online data collection map and share out storm data during and after each precipitation event. It will be interesting for classes to see how their data fits into the bigger district snowfall map. This data will be shared also with local TV and NWS as well as with our active “snowday watch” facebook page.

As part of this project CCWS will develop a set of signage and a corresponding digital platform to make data collection at our two ground-based weather stations accessible to the entire community. Any student, dog-walker, parent or neighbor who was interested could come and read about how the instruments work, what they measure, and contribute to our weather data record. Pictures and first-person experiences of the weather will be encouraged to go along with the numerical measurements. Give a student an instrument and a task of measurement, connect them to an audience, and they become a scientist.