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Long Island is host to many activities that depend on the weather. For example, East Moriches is home to the U.S. Coast Guard, boating and fishing stations and an airfield, as well as nurseries, vegetable and fruit farms and duck farms. Many people in our community enjoy outdoor recreational activities, such as school and extracurricular sports, water sports, hiking, biking, running, hang gliding and parachuting.

An accurate local weather report is important to residents and visitors alike. In response to this need, we invite your class to build and staff a school weather station. As the Weather Watchers, you will need to:

• Assemble the instruments needed to gather weather data.
• Use the instruments to gather and record data.
• Analyze data and information to make weather predictions.
• Make this information available to the school and surrounding community.

What can you learn from your data? If you keep track of your data every day, you can do a research study. For example, you might determine how accurate your predictions are. You might think about connections between two weather factors such as air presure and precipitation. You might might look for trends in the weather or find out if there are times when your predictions are more accurate than others.

Weather Watchers has two products:

• Local weather reports, including a school weather news Website.
• Research study reports, including data shared with other researchers.

During your research study you will be recording meteorological data that you can share with other researchers. The data you collect will supplement data gathered by Brookhaven National Laboratory meteorologists to predict and report the weather for Long Island. They have been collecting data since 1949. Their Website has lots of information including weather trend data and weather in realtime.

Your research study will be richer if you collaborate with students from other schools who are doing similar resarch. In a collaboration you work together to design and conduct your research. Project W.A.R.M., a meteorological network of schools collaborating with BNL, uses data to generate a picture of the varied mini-climates of Long Island. You can check with W.A.R.M. schools to see if other classes would like to join your study. In return, you will be able to access information from and get assistance in weather prediction from the scientists at the BNL weather facility.

Created for the Fermilab LInC program sponsored by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Education Office and Friends of Fermilab, and funded by United States Department of Energy, Illinois State Board of Education, North Central Regional Technology in Education Consortium which is operated by North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL), and the National Science Foundation.

Author: Karen R. LiVecchi livecchik@aol.com East Moriches UFSD, East Moriches, New York. Edited by Marge Bardeen, NTEP II PI.
Webmaster: ed-webmaster@fnal.gov
Created: September 9, 1998 - Updated: December 9, 1998
URL: /ntep/f98/projects/bnl/weather/student/index.html