Meteorological education of young people and information for the general public in Europe

On the way to an Association of the European Meteorological Societies (EMS) which will be founded in September 1999 the German Meteorological Society (DMG) and the Societé Mé-téorologique de France (SMF) distributed questionnaires to 27 European Meteorological Societies concerning meteorological education at school, and also of meteorological information of the general public. We got answers from 24 Societies, but for this school related part only from 15. Most of the re-sults are available under http://wwwsat03.met.fu-berlin.de/~dmg (see ECTOM=European Cata-logue of Training Opportunities in Meteorology. They show that the content of school curricula concerning atmospheric sciences varies much in the different countries and that it is very difficult to compare the different European school systems. We learnt that meteorological knowledge is mostly not sufficiently given at schools in many countries. Because of that the national EMSs should try some efforts in their countries to improve meteorological information. Some proposals have been given with the answers of the questionnaires and will be shown. Concerning information for the general Public we organised a Conference (1998) with more than 20 lecturers giving information about the preparation of weather forecasts, of visualisation, well understandable writing and – from media people – of the acceptance of weather information. We also did some experiments with students at our Institute in Berlin: We went to a shopping centre and asked ”normal” people about their understanding of weather reports. The results of nearly 200 answers are twofold: Most of them know much about the information weather reports are provid-ing, but the meteorological wording, esp. the words ”fair”, ”cloudy”, ”overcast” are not in use with the same meaning, meteorologists are thinking of! Much of this information contains the new (1998) DMG-book (in German language) ”Wetterinformation für die Öffentlichkeit – aber wie?”