The contributions to meteorological education by The Franklin Institute (TFI) are highlighted, from the seminal observational efforts of James Espy in the 1830s to the current award-winning web site at www.fi.edu.
"Education and learning are to be cultivated and ignorance dissipated." These words of Benjamin Franklin articulate the mission of TFI, a non-profit corporation chartered in 1824 to honor Franklin and to further the understanding and application of science. Almost 175 years later, the mission of promoting public understanding of science and strengthening science education continue to guide and focus TFI's educational pursuits on site and on-line.
Given Franklin's leadership in meteorological thought in the 18th century, meteorology was a centerpiece of the early years at TFI. James Espy, TFI's first meteorologist, was the catalyst, lecturing at TFI and publishing in its Journal on subjects ranging from the cooling of air by expansion to the significance of the dew point in forecasting. Espy was most interested, however, in understanding the structure and paths of storms. To this end, he lobbied for a government-subsidized national network of observers, a dream that was partially realized in 1837 when the Pennsylvania Legislature appropriated $4000 to TFI to establish and run a state-wide meteorological observational system, a forerunner to the present-day nationwide observational networks. With this data, meteorological pioneers such as Espy cemented concepts such as the general west-to-east movement of storms and the cloudy consequences of the convergence of air toward low pressure.
In this century, there has been a weather station at TFI since 1934. In the 1960s, live weather broadcasts on local television originated at TFI, while in the 1990s, the weather station has served as a studio for special reports during weather crises. Currently the weather center utilizes McIDAS and UNISYS software to display real-time weather data on a large-screen projector for visitors.
In addition to the weather station, TFI maintains an innovative museum of science with many meteorologically-relevant exhibits and programs. Powers of Nature, a traveling exhibit created at TFI, debuted in February 1998 and features real-time weather data from WSI, artifacts damaged in lightning strikes, hailstorms, and hurricanes, and a portion of an actual hurricane-hunter plane with three-screen video inside the plane showing transit into and out of a hurricane's eye.
Beyond the museum walls, TFI has the most extensive museum-school partnership in the nation. This partnership extends to the WWW, where TFI is the lead institution for the Science Learning Network (SLN), a national alliance of science centers and K-8 schools which helps teachers strengthen the way they teach science and math through networked technologies and professional development activities. TFI's own web site is an outgrowth of SLN. Featured as the number-one family-friendly science site in the U.S. Department of Education's Parents Guide to the Internet, www.fi.edu offers many classroom resources, including instructions for making your own weather station and hot lists of useful teaching sites for Meteorology