The American Meteorology Society’s Project Atmospheres program is a continuing education/professional development course developed to support K-12 teachers to improve teacher knowledge of atmospheric sciences to support interest and understanding of the science, technology and mathematics in pre-college students. The course serves to both share knowledge and provide teachers with “scientifically and pedagogically sound instructional resources materials” for teachers to use in their classrooms to further interest in STEM education and motivate the next generation of atmospheric science and meteorology professionals.
Lori Schultz, as part of the third year of NASA Disasters Program support, led the discussion on use of satellite-based Earth observations to look at the development of, occurrence and after effects of natural hazards that turn into natural disasters. Over a two hour period, 20 participating teachers from around the United States were introduced to observations of hurricane development and landfall, Saharan dust events, wildfires using the unique observations from NASA instruments (MODIS, MISR, GPM) with additional looks at imagery from ESA Copernicus’ Sentinel series and the USGS Landsat series. The session covered the research and development of the techniques used by NASA to find new ways to observe the Earth surface with instruments (synthetic aperture radar) and data processing (image processing, data fusion) as well as included a lively discussion on multiple web-based resources the teachers could utilize in their classrooms, to encourage hands-on learning.
