LEVERAGING DATASETS FOR EARTH SCIENCE EDUCATION, WITH AMS EDUCATION CURRICULA

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) Education Program offers three unique curriculum packages to undergraduate institutions and has over 32 years experience developing teacher professional development (PD) programs in the fluid Earth sciences. All courses use environmental datasets to support learning, activities, and further exploration.

At the introductory undergraduate-level, AMS provides data-driven Weather, Ocean, and Climate Studies curriculum packages well suited for instructor-lead online delivery. We curate protected RealTime Portals, which deliver e-textbooks and weekly data-driven Current Studies that undergraduate students and faculty incorporate as they work through our weather, ocean, and climate curricula. Course participants also examine numerous geoscience datasets through the annually-updated Investigations Manuals, also delivered via our RealTime portals. Faculty are invited to request an exam copy of the curriculum package via the online forms under each course at ametsoc.org/UndergradFaculty.

AMS K-12 teacher PD programs offer tuition-free graduate credit in cooperation with Pennsylvania Western University. We provide semester-long, online DataStreme courses in: Atmosphere, Ocean, and Earth’s Climate System, and competitive-selection summer courses: Project Atmosphere, Project Ocean, and soon Project Ice. All activities are made possible with support from NOAA, ONR, NSF, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and the AMS membership. Teacher participants use environmental data in all their AMS courses.

AMS also maintains publicly available “Maps and Links” web pages with a combination of custom developed real time weather products and carefully chosen weather, ocean, and climate datasets that anyone can use to exploreEarth systems. Surveys show that educators routinely share these sites with students and integrate their favorite materials into classroom lessons. Visit the pages at ametsoc.org/WeatherStudiesLinks, ametsoc.org/OceanStudiesLinks, and ametsoc.org/ClimateStudiesLinks. Additional web resources specifically for exploring weather are available at https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/education-careers/education-program/weather-resources/