For more than 20 years, the UCAR COMET® Program has provided continuing education to a wide spectrum of users in the geoscience community. COMET's training covers a multitude of topic areas including: satellite meteorology, numerical weather prediction, hydrometeorology and hydrology, climate science, tropical meteorology, marine and coastal weather, fire weather, aviation weather, observational systems, topics in mesoscale meteorology, and emergency management and societal concerns.

The majority of the training offered by COMET is delivered as self-paced web-based modules on COMET's MetEd website (http://meted.ucar.edu). Greater than 400 web-based training modules (over 600 hours of material) is organized by topic areas and some of them are also organized in to collections of modules called 'Distance Learning Courses' . Approximately 100 modules have been translated into other languages, primarily Spanish and French. Currently, 185,000+ users have registered on the site, about one-third from outside of the United States. The site receives about 125,000 unique visitors each month and more than 50,000 quizzes were successfully completed in the past year.

The education community makes up a large percentage of our user base: 52% of our registered users affiliate themselves with education. COMET is making strides to better serve this community:

• A recent redesign of the MetEd website adds new functionality aimed at educators and students with more updates in the works

• Our sponsors are funding an effort to develop a series of short, self-contained online learning objects to support dynamic meteorology instruction

• We are developing an extensive collection of links to online resources (both MetEd and third party sites) aligned with a generic 'Introduction to Meteorology' curriculum

Details of these efforts will be shared and discussed.

This abstract was prepared by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research under cooperative agreement award #NA06NWS4670013 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce.