84th AMS Annual Meeting

Sunday, 11 January 2004
Integration of a field component and inquiry-based learning in an instrumentation meteorology course
Hall 4AB
Dev Niyogi, North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC; and V. K. Saxena
Poster PDF (84.9 kB)
Through the National Science Foundation’s Awards to Facilitate Geophysical Education, a project is underway at North Carolina State University to design, implement, and evaluate the development of undergraduate level course with a focus on meteorological instrumentation and observations of climate variables, along with the analysis and interpretation of climate data, and community interactions to develop cause - effect associations. Project objectives are to: (i) Educate and Train undergraduate students with practical applications of field instrumentation, measurements and observations; (ii) Introduce students to the synthesis of heterogeneous instrumentation output, with human observations, for data assurance and interpretation, and multidisciplinary applications, and (iii) Promote and Emphasize student - community interactions for understanding the microvariability in climatological observations, and its feedback on regional perceptions. The course is focused on the issue of educating students on climate analysis both as a monitoring and outlook problem, along with a cause and effect based policy problem through community partnerships and feedback. The student interactions will involve hands - on training with meteorological instrumentation and analysis of climate variables using real - time and archived data, and web-based models. We will discuss the application of an array of field – tested instrumentation (radiation, micrometeorological, and air pollution related) and calibration facilities, and a statewide operational / research sites for such an application. The broader application of such a course is the development of different exploratory analyses using in-situ observations available through different university networks.

Supplementary URL: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dsniyogi