Please welcome Haley Wicklein from the NH Leitzel Center GLOBE Partnership as a guest blogger. Haley is very familiar with GLOBE through her work on the GLOBE Carbon Cycle project. She was an elementary school science specialist and has now returned to the University of New Hampshire!
There are new GLOBE Weather Stations at work at six schools in NH!
This fall, Jen Bourgeault and I traveled to schools across New Hampshire to help install GLOBE Weather Stations. With these stations, the students will monitor soil and air temperature, relative humidity, and rainfall as they learn about the atmosphere. We had a great time working with the teachers and the wonderful maintenance teams to locate the right spot - a compromise between a spot that is open, flat, and grassy for good atmosphere measurements, easy to access for the students, and one that still works with the logistical constraints of school grounds (not in the middle of the playground, or where they pile snow in the winter). Here are a few highlights:
At D.J. Bakie Elementary School in Kingston, Marianne Klemarczyk showed us a nice spot near the school's outdoor classroom and garden- a spot the students are used to visiting. Luckily, Jen pointed out that we shouldn't put it over the septic leach field nearby- that might artificially elevate the soil temperature!
The maintenance team at Milton Elementary School was awesome- I think they were as excited about the weather data as the students are! They helped us chose a spot that would be easy for the students to get to in the winter (very important for New Hampshire!) and not too protected by the buildings, which could alter the temperature measurements.
Ellen O'Donnell, a science teacher at Deerfield Community School, found a perfect spot for her school's weather station: open, flat, grassy and away from the playground! She also added a nice label on the instrument shelter so the whole community knows what is going on inside that white box.
At the end of November, teachers were trained in some of the atmosphere protocols and how to set up and use the instruments. Solar noon at this time of year in NH is about 11:30am EST and we asked the teachers to think about when they would most likely be recording data. The reset time on the min-max multi-day thermometers should be at least 5 minutes before students record data. Teachers were asked to hit the reset button about 15 minutes before the proposed recording time and practice reading a couple measurements before our next professional development day in February.
We can't wait to see the data the students collect!
