Argonne, Homer School District build middle school weather station

ARGONNE, Ill. (March 24, 2006) — The weather seemed fitting.

With a bone-chilling wind whipping across the field behind Hadley Middle School in Homer Glen, students and researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory carried a 30-foot weather station outside for installation, the beginning of a first-of-its-kind collaboration in the state of Illinois.

By installing a fully operational meteorological observation system at the school and integrating its operation and the data it gathers into the district's curriculum, Argonne and Homer School District 33C will bring long-term, real-world science and mathematics experiences into the classroom. This type of hands-on learning helps students to develop problem solving skills and encourages them to consider pursuing careers in science. This project solidifies a strong science and mathematics partnership between Argonne and the Homer School District.

The weather station will be operated and maintained by students and science faculty, with Argonne scientists mentoring students, providing professional expertise to help develop teaching materials, and giving presentations on using the instruments and data collected.

“We want to help educators do more than just teach science to their students,” said Argonne meteorologist Doug Sisterson. "We want them to do science with their students."

Using their own equipment, designing their own experiments and collecting their own data will give students a better feel for what it's really like to be a scientist, Sisterson said.

“We teach kids inadvertently, that there is always an outcome in science,” he said. “Truthfully, doing science is about the process not just the outcome. There isn't a book of all knowledge that we get the key to when we become a scientist. You know you have the right answer when a lot of people do the same experiment and everyone gets the same results.”

Using the station as a teaching tool has already begun. By the time the tower was raised, more than 300 students had already been involved with learning about and actually assembling the equipment — the same type of equipment used worldwide by the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility (ACRF). This is a national user facility, with operations managed by Argonne.

The school's station will measure temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, pressure, solar radiation, soil temperature at three levels, and precipitation.

Argonne researcher Mike Ritsche worked with the students to assemble the equipment.

“The students seemed very excited to be involved," Ritsche said. "We did everything we could to involve the students in the assembly of the tower and connection of the sensors. It allowed the students to take ownership of the system. It will be the students who maintain the weather station with support from us here at Argonne, so early integration into the process is necessary. It also shows them that science isn't always done in a laboratory."

Another Argonne team member, Craig Swietlik, will bring his expertise of mathematics and data visualization to the project. He will work with teachers to develop creative and interesting ways to display the data collected in visual and interactive forms so that the students get a better understanding of how the data they collect applies to weather and climate. This work will involve mathematical computations of weather related parameters, statistical analysis, correlations between parameters, and computer visualizations of the data and its relationships.

The station will be incorporated into the science and mathematics curriculum at all levels. For example, temperature can be shown to early elementary students simply by a big thermometer that can be manually manipulated to display the temperature that day. Then, the students can check out the actual temperature, which gives relevance to temperature for the youngest of students.

Middle elementary students will learn about the Fahrenheit and Celsius temperature scales and the mathematics used for conversion from one scale to the other.

Older elementary students begin to associate temperature with the motion of molecules and universal gas constant. They can apply heat transfer theory to temperatures in the soil, using the data acquired by the weather station. They experience the relevance of the mathematics by doing their own experiments with real data collected from the weather station.

Sisterson and District 33C Superintendent William Young have high hopes for the collaboration's future. There is the potential for development of a Web-based database that could be shared between schools, as well as the potential for additional weather stations at feeder schools and partnerships with other school districts.

The possibilities for students to do science may be as endless as the weather changes in Chicago on a fall day. — Donna Jones Pelkie