Faculty and educators from four National Computational Science Alliance members of the Education, Outreach, and Training – Partnership for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (EOT-PACI) are collaborating with the Mesoscale Environment for Atmospheric Discovery (MEAD) Expedition, whose goal is to develop/adapt cyberinfrastructure that will enable simulation, datamining/machine learning and visualization of hurricanes and storms utilizing the TeraGrid.

The goal of the MEAD Education and Outreach effort is to create and make available interactive and hands-on tools, materials, and resources appropriate for use in K-12 and undergraduate classrooms. Students using these resources will have the opportunity to discover more about the nature of uncertainty and other aspects of weather.

The models being developed include an interactive balloon model developed with the Java programming language, model simulations of Hurricane Floyd and its subsequent rainfall and damage that can be viewed with GIS software, STELLA-based hurricane simulations that create possible hurricane paths from historical data, and physical-to-computational connection models such as shooting foam 'shooter' discs that stir student interest into building simple STELLA models. Maryland Virtual High School will help develop, use and evaluate curricula at the high school level.

We will show a number of these interactive models and exercises as well as their initial impact and overall integration into the MEAD environment.