Educating Viewers: Practical ways to enhance weather education in your viewing area

Having a strong program in place to educate students in your area on the subject of meteorology doesn't have to be an issue of market size. All too often, the cost of doing a large-scale educational outreach prohibits stations in smaller markets from building a comprehensive weather education program.

However, whether you are in a small or large market or any size in between, there are some tried-and-true methods that can help you build an image of weather outreach in your DMA.

In this presentation, several ideas of how to reach out to area schools will be given. Methods of how to establish yourself and your station as a weather education leader will be given that were utilized at KTKA in Topeka, KS during a news operation start-up. Building a new station and an image for a weather department can be a huge undertaking, but the lessons learned from this experience have helped shape a weather education program that can be applied to nearly any station in any market.