Recent university-wide directives that students should become more involved in the education process with hands-on research and increased classroom interactions (both orally and in written form) have been facilitated through the development of our computer based program called "ClimProb". ClimProb is currently being used in our introductory climatology course as well as our introductory meteorology course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. ClimProb has provided a hands-on data analysis experience for our students with the opportunity to reinforce basic climatological and meteorological principles.
The old-fashioned "lecture and note" taking environment has been replaced with an interactive learning environment. Combining ClimProb with access to data sets on the World Wide Web has created a computer based, project oriented method of teaching and learning, emphasizing the use of contemporary technology to learn the basic concepts. Student excitement about learning as well as student performance has dramatically increased. We knew this was a success when we had students asking for the next assignment ahead of time.
The ClimProb data sets, many of which extend back 90-100 years, consist of 17 temperature, 6 precipitation, and 8 degree day variables. Beyond the required classroom projects, the students can chose particular aspects of the climate data set or regions of the country that particularly interest them for individualized class projects. Some of the meteorological and climatological principles that are examined include: continental vs maritime influences on temperature and precipitation extremes; drought cycles; seasonal thermal lags; the actual shape of the annual cycle of temperatures and thermal singularities; the climatology of persistence and reversals of thermal and precipitation extremes; the climatology of the southwest U.S. monsoon; the climatology of air masses and frontal passages; temperature/precipitation relationships; urban-rural climate differences; "Greenhouse Warming" and other climate trends compared to climate variability; the characteristics of historically significant climatic events such as the dust bowl years in the 1930's; and, the response of thermal and precipitation variables compared to data sets not included in ClimProb (such as ENSO data). The software includes a built-in graphing procedure. However, the data results are also easily imported into other graphical software packages in our computer lab for specialized graphing.
Examples of the class projects will be presented, and we will provide a hands-on demonstration of the use of ClimProb during our presentation. Handouts will be provided to illustrate how this can be incorporated into the classroom and information on acquiring ClimProb will be provided (it is free to educators). Finally, since the theme of this annual meeting is "Enhancing Public Awareness of Weather and Climate Prediction", we will illustrate how the results of some of the student projects have been given to our local media. For example, during Fall 1997 when a significant El Nino was predicted, our students looked at past Nebraska winters during strong El Ninos, they did a ClimProb analysis and we educated the public through a press release stating that Nebraska should have a warmer than normal and snowier than normal winter.