Meteorology and earth/space science at Heritage University

Heritage University is a private university located on the Yakama Reservation. With few science faculty, offering every course in the catalog on a regular basis is difficult. Meteorology has not been taught for over 5 years. The AMS Online Weather course will help address this need. The course will be offered in two modes; either completely online or online in a classroom, with assistance from the professor.

As part of the Washington Space Grant Consortium, Heritage Physical Sciences faculty have been working with University of Washington Earth Space Sciences faculty to collaboratively develop a student Access to Space program. Weather plays an important role in the high altitude ballooning projects used in the program.

The goal of this project is to integrate students in the AMS Online Weather course with other students in physical science courses into the balloon project, by offering additional course lab credits for participating in the Access to Space program. The complement of weather students and physical science students will collaboratively design and prepare experiments, launch and track the balloons and utilize knowledge and skills learned from their respective courses.