Atmospheric Science Data in the Earth Science Classroom: Sources and Suggestions
Round Table Discussion
Leader
Cody Kirkpatrick, Indiana University-Bloomington
Numerous courses in the earth science curriculum include at least some analysis of atmospheric science and climate data. At this roundtable, I would like to bring earth science educators together to share some of the ways they use meteorological or climatological data in their courses. We can share useful websites, datasets with which you've had success (or ones to avoid), resources that are easy to use and access, and ones that you or your students enjoy and come back to frequently in class. During the roundtable, we will curate a list of the most popular and favorite resources to share with all attendees.
Resources we talked about during the Round Table
(If you think of or find others we should add here, let me know)
Learning Modules, Activities, and Resources for Teachers
- MetEd from The COMET Program / UCAR - many atmospheric science modules, several that are more broad too, free registration
- UCAR Center for Science Education ("SciEd") - weather, climate, and earth system science resources for K12 faculty
Exploring and Visualizing Historical Hurricanes
- NOAA web tool to plot hurricane tracks over time
- The above tool is based on the HURDAT best track archive, raw data that students could use to subset and analyze
Exploring and Visualizing Historical Tornadoes
- Tornado Tracks tool by the Midwestern Regional Climate Center at Purdue
- The above tool is based on part of the Storm Prediction Center's data archive, which includes historical reports of tornadoes, wind, and hail (in CSV files)
Upper Air Data
- The popular archive from the University of Wyoming; ASCII text, Skew-T images, and more output types are available
- The RAOB database from NOAA's Global Systems Laboratory; can create tabular, easy-to-parse datasets with this tool
- An alternative to Wyoming, the Plymouth State University "Make Your Own Upper Air Chart" page
Lots of Data from a Specific Severe Weather Day
- The Storm Prediction Center Event Archive collects surface, upper air, radar (sometimes), and satellite (sometimes) on historical severe weather days. Days are searchable by year and/or state