The Center for Earth System Education (CESE) provides education outreach activities through the Department of Geology & Meteorology from Kean University. CESE's goals are to enhance outreach activities to the K-12 community and to work collaboratively with educators. These have been accomplished through school visits, tours of campus facilities, and workshops for teachers, presentations to the New Jersey Earth Science Teachers Association, and provision of educational resources and related training. Faculty and students have had opportunity during these to present their on-going research endeavors when interacting with participants. This acts to broaden the earth science experience for the K-12 community and often leads to the development of other collaborative or new activities. CESE thus offers service education and research outreach with the potential for enhanced cooperative research and collaborative education opportunities. While CESE provides important service to the community, an expansion of the CESE outreach program and its activities, with greater inclusion of research opportunities, is underway. The expansion will provide for greater activity and extend beyond the K-12 community so that collaborative projects may also be possible with state and federal partners and the private sector. The emphasis of this education and research outreach expansion will be based upon urban ecosystem studies of the New Jersey metropolitan area where the majority of the state's residents and students are found on a daily basis. This work will involve Kean University faculty and students across disciplines as they collaborate with one another as well as outside communities through observational data, conceptual and analytic diagnoses, modeling, and prediction. These will focus on hazardous weather and the impacts of various atmospheric conditions with regard to urban locations.