Environmental stories: using Earth Gauge and COMET program resources for creating video podcasts and presentations ----- MP3 audio file

The Earth Gauge™ program of the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) in partnership with the COMET™ Program have been creating a series of on-line courses and weekly environmental tips aimed at helping weathercasters understand the connection between weather and climate and environmental threats and protection to better inform their public and to be a key station resource for a breadth of environmental and earth system science topics. The materials for both the Earth Gauge Tips and the curriculum of online courses have been and are being designed to allow weathercasters to incorporate elements of each into their own on-air or Website stories. But, how would a weathercaster use these resources for developing such stories?

This paper will start to address this issue by showing some clips of weathercasters who have incorporated Earth Gauge tips into their on-air segments and to show how both Earth Gauge information and materials from the Earth Gauge Environmental Education courses can be used to develop weather, climate and the environment stories. In particular, it will be demonstrated how Earth Gauge Tips combined with resource materials from the Earth Gauge related courses can be used to create short story “nuggets” that can be placed on a Web site or distributed as a video podcast or incorporated into outreach presentation materials.