Watersheds and weather: short course for broadcast meteorologists

The recent launching of the Station Scientest website by the American Meteorological Society reflects the important role that the broadcast meteorologist can play in both informing and educating the public. When it comes to the protection of the environment, an informed and educated public is essential. This paper describes an effort that is the result of a partnership between the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation (NEETF) and the COMET Program. NEETF and COMET have developed a Broadcast Meteorology Website and a corresponding two hour short course titled,Watersheds:connecting weather to the environment.

The Broadcast Meteorologist Community Website compliments the AMS' Station Scientist Website and provides access to relevent online educational resources from the COMET Program and other sources. The online watersheds course provides the broadcast meteorologist with education on what a watershed is, watershed systems, water sources and water quality within a watershed and watershed system, and finally how weather events relate to the environmental health of a watershed and the actions that the public can take to protect watershed health.

This presentation will describe how the course was designed and will show excerpts from the course to illustrate the use of a story framework to organize science information, and the concept of "learning objects" to partition the instruction into small reusable "chunks" of content. The design of the course had two major goals: 1) to convey scientifically sound information about watersheds and the relationship of weather to watershed health, and 2) to do so in a way that models how such information may be communicated effectively to the public. Another goal of the project was to design the materials in a way that broadcast meteorologists could readily borrow content from the course to use either on their station websites or on the air.