AIRS and Outreach: Bringing Weather Down to Earth
--Marguerite Syvertson (mlss@scn1.jpl.nasa.gov), AIRS Outreach Coordinator, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The goals of the AIRS Outreach Program are to educate and inspire teachers, students, and the public about the Earth, its climate, and remote sensing technology, and to familiarize them with the NASA programs that study our home planet. We plan to use a variety of venues to communicate with and involve our target audiences: the Internet and World Wide Web, teacher training, curriculum enhancements, weather stations, posters, displays, and partners such as universities, industry, and other governmental organizations.
The AIRS Homepage (http://www-airs.jpl.nasa.gov/) provides a wealth of information on AIRS and its role in global climate studies as well as links to several other NASA and climate programs. Overviews of the energy and water cycles, explanations of El Niño, and a clickable instrument with detailed descriptions are available. Recent scientific developments, articles, and papers have also been put on-line by the project. We have linked our homepage to those of team members (University of Wisconsin, University of California-Santa Barbara, and Goddard Space Flight Center), with other Mission to Planet Earth and EOS homepages, and with available up-to-the-minute weather sites such as WeatherWorld at University of Illinois and the Purdue Weather Processor. A search engine (Alta Vista) is also available from the homepage.
AIRS has participated in a variety of public events at JPL and in the Los Angeles area. In 1995, JPL held an Earth Day festival in which we demonstrated our homepage and briefed the public on topical areas of interest such as El Niño, global warming, and atmospheric circulation.
At the 1995 JPL Open House, the AIRS Outreach program pioneered the development and coordination of the Earth Walk, bringing together the various Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE) projects at JPL in a co-located area and partnering with the Multi-Angle Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MISR) project on a Weather and Climate booth. This partnering concept is expanding at the 1996 JPL Open House June 8 and 9, with the creation of three thematic booths (Air, Land, and Ocean). We will be combining forces with the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES), and MISR to cover the atmosphere from the ground up.
AIRS, in conjunction with the other JPL EOS projects, additionally has taken and plans to continue to take its display to local education and public fairs, conferences, and other events.
Teachers are the key to integrating MTPE curricula into the classroom. Teachers use materials with which they are comfortable. By ensuring that teachers are competent and comfortable with the subject matter and materials that we provide, we have a higher likelihood of their use. Educating teachers about our Earth, climate, the AIRS instrument, and MTPE creates a multiplier effect -- teachers will then share this knowledge with other teachers in their districts and with their students. The AIRS Project, in conjunction with MTPE, will also provide relevant materials to teacher training programs (universities) for use in their training curriculum. These new teachers can then use these materials and knowledge in their future classrooms.
JPL is developing a partnership with the California State University system (CSU) to increase scientific literacy and awareness of its non-science and education students and teachers around the state. The CSU system is the largest university system in the world with over 340,000 students; nearly 70% of the licensed teachers in California are CSU graduates. The agreement includes communicating the latest discoveries and technology to students, teachers, and the public via workshops and electronic media; providing user-friendly access to Earth and space science data; creating Earth and space science curricula for use in universities and K-12 classrooms; developing in situ experiments for use by students; and building working partnerships between faculty at both CSU and JPL.
AIRS plans to provide relevant data sets and assist with the coordination of access to other Earth science data for use in education and public workshops, data repositories, and curriculum development. We also plan to provide support to CSU in their development of Earth science curricula and measurement systems for use by CSU students and classrooms. Additionally, the experience of our staff as participants, lecturers, and coordinators in the Summer School for Earth Sciences and the Global Change Workshop for Teachers, hosted by JPL and the California Space Institute, will be useful in developing workshops for pre-service teachers and the public.
AIRS hopes to invite a teacher to spend one to two years on this project and other projects within EOS and MTPE. This teacher will assist in developing curriculum enhancements and activities, websites, and other materials. In turn, the teacher will have the opportunity to learn about the MTPE program and how NASA is studying the Earth.
As guidelines for our educational products, AIRS is using national and state science frameworks such as the NRC's National Science Education Standards and the Science Framework for California Public Schools. The California State Science Framework is organized along six major science themes:
These themes link ideas across different scientific disciplines and are not used as subject material themselves. They integrate concepts and facts from the many science disciplines, provide a context for teaching these disciplines, and encourage better science writing in curriculum materials.
Our goals for curriculum enhancement development are to provide useful, relevant, and up-to-date information electronically for students, teachers, and the public. We have identified five science subject areas that relate to AIRS for our focus: clouds, El Niño, weather/climate, global warming, and carbon dioxide. For each of these subjects, we have created questions that address the various science themes above, as well as human interactions. These questions, by subject area, follow:
Each question has been assigned to a member of the science team; the resulting answers and information will be refined and enhanced by the outreach coordinator, who will also ensure that the answers are targeted at the high school/middle school level as defined by the California State Science Framework. The TIP teacher will also participate in the translation of the information into curricula once he or she is on the project.
This information, and related activities/experiments, will eventually be published on the AIRS homepage. An initial draft of the Cloud page is nearly completed and will be on-line shortly.
One of our most ambitious goals is to allow students to participate in their own "Mission to Planet Earth." We are investigating the use of student weather stations and weather data downlink (or Internet-link) sites so that students may take measurements of variables at their locations and compare them to measurements at other locations and to satellite data. We look to partner with and augment existing efforts such as the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) project to leverage our efforts and reach the largest audience possible. We also plan to develop technology demonstrations, such as infrared measurement systems, that will allow students to understand how AIRS works.
The goals for our outreach program are to excite and educate students, teachers, and the public about Earth's weather and climate, and simultaneously increase their knowledge of science, technology, and the world around them. We look forward to working with other EOS and MTPE projects to bring outreach "down to Earth."
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