Rooftop stations become a teaching tool
By: Hilary Parker
Area residents looking for an up-to-date weather forecast, complete with wind speed and barometric pressure, needn’t look any further than their local school district.
Atop the high school in the Princeton Regional Schools, and on the Village schools in both the Montgomery Township and West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional school districts, sits a complete WeatherBug weather station.
Easily accessible to anyone with Internet access at www.weatherbug.com, these weather stations generate reports every second and are part of a network of 8,000 throughout the country.
Once the station is installed, there’s remarkably little upkeep beyond the annual fee to WeatherBug, said Brian Stevens, principal of West Windsor-Plainsboro’s Village School. Although weather is not a curricular unit in the fourth and fifth grades housed in his building, Mr. Stevens said the weather station nevertheless comes in handy on a daily basis.
Each morning, different students are responsible for the weather report segment of the morning announcements, he said. They gather the information for their intercom report which may soon be televised from a computer in the media center linked to the weather station on the roof.
"Weather as a unit isn’t really part of our curriculum, however it’s something that’s all around us," Mr. Stevens said. "(The students) do like reporting it a lot, especially whether it will be outdoor recess," he added with a laugh.
The stations may be relatively self-sufficient once they’re installed, but with all the recent construction and renovation at Princeton High School, Manager of Information Technology Peter Thompson did need to make some adjustments to the equipment. It was back up and running in short order though, and the information it collects is readily available in the "Weather Information" section on the high school’s Web site.
Montgomery’s weather station is one of around 1,000 nationwide that includes a camera generating new images around the clock. Along with this visual component, the district also supplements its weather station with a subscription to WeatherBug Achieve, which comes complete with lesson plans and customizable tools to generate different reports.
"The most exciting pieces of the tool are the mapping tools and the fact that we have these live and time-lapse images," said Montgomery Director of Curriculum and Instruction for Science Erin Peacock. "The camera allows students to observe how weather changes over time they get a visual representation of what they see in the graphical representation of the data."
For example, she said, students can be taught that if the dew point matches the temperature, some type of condensation will occur. With the camera, they can confirm this fact and solidify their understanding of the concept.
Given the nationwide network of stations, all of which are accessible online, Ms. Peacock said it doesn’t even matter if the weather in central New Jersey is, well, rather boring.
"They can do this across the country," she said. "We may not be having interesting weather, but they can go to where they visited on vacation or go to grandma’s house. It just opens up the world as a whole you’re not local anymore. It’s really using the power of the Internet."
The station may be located on one of Montgomery’s elementary schools, but there are plenty of uses for it at the higher grade levels as well. This year, the high school is offering a new computer-assisted meteorology class that may soon make use of the technologies. At the middle school level, it serves as a nice adjunct to the sixth-grade science curriculum’s study of storms.
Sixth-grade science teacher Erin Harsell said she plans to use the graphing tools available through WeatherBug Achieve this February when she teaches her class about storms and cloud formation, particularly the relationship between air pressure, temperature and cloudiness.
"I’m hoping to take a look at pressure and temperature on a given day, and then look at the clouds, and see if we can make any connection between the pressure in the air and whether it’s cloudy or not cloudy," she said. "Kids don’t really recognize it if they look at a barometer number," she added, but they do understand if they look at real-time photographs and pressure measurements.
While WeatherBug Achieve allows for some rather complex analyses to take place, Ms. Harsell said it isn’t difficult for teachers to learn how to use the program. Each section contains tutorials designed to teach educators to use the program to suit their curricular and classroom needs, and even touches on state curriculum standards.
"It is very user-friendly," she said.

