Many university courses utilize Internet resources to supplement lecture material and/or provide a laboratory setting for learning outside the classroom, but often find ‘web-books’ containing only text with few or no examples. The problem with this – especially within meteorology – is that accurate, useful, and if possible, real-life examples of weather phenomenon are necessary to best enhance the educational process. The implementation of the current weather products in Weather World 2010 (WW2010 – http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/) offers such real-life examples of educational material in the atmospheric sciences.
WW2010’s educational content, which includes modules spanning topics from the hydrologic cycle to satellites to El Niño, already contains examples in the form of movies, diagrams, and photographs – offering survey level instructors an ideal Internet learning environment. Each module is self-contained, yet all are interconnected through intermediate helper pages. The integration of weather products and data into this environment creates a dynamic two-way effect in enhancing the potential for understanding. Clickable access from real-time weather maps to the helper pages allows instructors and students easy access to the definitions, explanations, and examples they need. However, even more useful -- and unique to WW2010 -- is the ability to provide weather products as real-world examples linked to the instructional materials. This gives students the ability to cognitively translate between educational topics and current events, such as hurricanes and severe storms. Teachers and students can interactively combine satellite and radar images with different fields at different levels to demonstrate the interaction of different atmospheric aspects using real-time information. This integration will be effective in classroom and laboratory settings within university introductory level courses and laboratories, as well as any others interested in learning more about the science behind the weather maps.