Hi my name is Clayton Painter. I have been using data from the Oklahoma Mesonet for the past five years. My mom was one of the first teachers who used the Mesonet. I wasn’t in her classroom but the weather program was so easy I would play with it after school. I have played a lot of computer games but this one was different, it changed from day to day, minute to minute and it was all about Oklahoma.
I finally made it to sixth grade and my mom’s science class where we used Mesonet and the WxScope software to learn about weather. But it didn’t stop there! We used it in Math to learn about graphing, rounding, angles, and relationships. After we graphed temperatures (instead of animals sold at a pet store I had never heard of) I finally understood how and why a graph was made and why it was important. It seems like this was a special program just for us. I have never had a textbook that taught us about Oklahoma the way the Mesonet does.
I have always know the shape of Oklahoma but I didn’t know it had so much variety. From one climate region to the next, Oklahoma is very interesting and fun to learn about–kind of like discovering Oklahoma through Mesonet.
I used my new skills and understanding to do a science fair project for the Mesonet Science Fair at OU. It was fun and I learned a lot about weather. This year I was in seventh grade and I am in a new school, but I still did a science fair project for the Mesonet science fair. It was the highlight of my year. I will be an eighth grader next year and I have already started on my next year’s project. I am always watching the weather and studying it. I think the love of weather I found when studying the Mesonet will be one of the greatest thing I learned in school! READING, WRITING, AND MESONET!!!!