Weather in the classroom

As part of our sub-project "What's In Your Air, Alex", we have started producing weekly weather forecasts especially for the CONA study town of Alexandra, specifically aimed at our junior scientists at Alexandra Primary School.

Take a look!


Click this link to see an example forecast: https://vimeo.com/album/5177939

The forecasts are presented by Maria Augutis, based in NIWA's Auckland office. Maria came down to Alexandra a few weeks ago to talk to year 5 and 6 about how we create weather forecasts. Now we are delivering weekly forecasts into the classroom using a weblink, with videos also accessible through our project app (more on that in a future post).

In the meantime, we're asking the children to make their own weather observations to check up on how Maria is doing - or more precisely to understand first-hand how the very local weather we experience can deviate from the more regional scale that we can forecast.


Finally we are helping them to record conditions using a "weather bag". This is simply a plastic sandwich bag with some coloured water in it. When taped to a window condensation will form in the bag, or will evaporate, depending on the temperature of the window, and particularly the temperature of the air outside the window.

Soon we'll be able to see what the children have collected. And soon after that we'll start adding air quality observations into the mix.

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