Goal 3, Priority 2: Enhancing Science Education
NCAR advances this priority through collaborations and relationships with visiting scientists, postdoctoral and faculty fellowship appointments, and professional development programs.
FY2007 Accomplishments
Click to enlarge.The ASP Summer Colloquium was held 4-15 June 2007. Morning lectures were followed by afternoon tutorials. Above, students participate in a hands-on computer tutorial.
The lynchpin in ensuring development of science education opportunities at NCAR, for students and scientists at the graduate level and above, SERE’s Advanced Study Program sponsored 28 postdoctoral fellows, providing each fellow with salary, travel and relocation funds, benefits, and computer costs, as well as administrative support. ASP also supported nine graduate students through its NCAR Graduate Fellowship (NGF) Program, Summer Colloquium series and Graduate Visitor Program (GVP). NGFs carry out their thesis research in full-time residence at NCAR, while GVP fellows come to NCAR for visits of three to 12 months in pursuit of their thesis research.
For several decades now, SERE’s ASP has hosted at least one 2-week colloquium every summer on an emerging science topic of interest to the NCAR community. Designed for graduate students in a new or rapidly developing area of research for which good course materials may not yet be available, the colloquia have both a lecture component and a hands-on tutorial component. This year’s colloquium, entitled “Regional Biogeochemistry: Needs and Methodologies”, was hosted by an ASP postdoctoral Fellow, and included 50 graduate student attendees, and 41 presenters.
Click to enlarge.The ASP and Early Career Scientist Assembly (ECSA) host an annual forum on future scientific directions at NCAR. The objective of this forum is to bring together junior faculty and members of NCAR's ECSA to discuss selected topics in the geosciences. Above are the participants of the 2007 Junior Faculty Forum at NCAR, held 9-11 July 2007.
Beginning in 2003, ASP and the Early Career Scientist Assembly (ECSA) began hosting an annual Junior Faculty Forum at NCAR on future scientific directions. The Forum targets two to three specific topics of interest based on feedback from early career staff from NCAR and the university community. In FY2007, topics included: 1) Geophysical and statistical challenges in detection/attribution of regional climate change, and 2) Coupling terrestrial and atmospheric water dynamics to improve predictability in a changing environment. A total of 27 participants came to NCAR to meet with ECSA staff, and to discuss and to write papers on these topics.
During FY2007, NCAR also supported professional development workshops offered by EO at venues across the country, with an emphasis on the National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) national and regional conferences, and state-based professional development opportunities. These venues allow large numbers of teachers to be reached at low cost, providing a cost-effective approach to professional development. NCAR reached out to more than 2,700 teachers through this program in FY2007.
NCAR also provides support for the office of the National Earth Science Teachers Association (NESTA), a nonprofit educational organization of approximately 1,000 members (more than 90% are K-12 geoscience teachers) that works to advance and improve Earth science education at all levels. NCAR support is critical, as NESTA moves to provide services to existing members, as well as the broader Earth and Space Science education community.
Support from NCAR over the past year has also enabled EO to continue development of the NCAR Online Education program, with an initial focus on climate and global change through the Climate Discovery online course sequence: “Introduction to Earth's Climate,” “Earth System Science: A Climate Change Perspective,” and “Understanding Climate” (due Winter 2008). And, with completion of the Sixth NCAR Undergraduate Leadership, which had just over 20 competitively chosen participants attending, more than 120 undergraduate students have participated in this program since its founding.
Click to enlarge.These interns worked at NCAR in the mutually beneficial SIParCS program. The CISL-based SIParCS program challenges students in applied mathematics and computational science to help solve real-world problems associated with CISL's mission to support the atmospheric and related sciences. The students gain valuable work experience, and CISL is cultivating a skilled workforce for future supercomputing centers.
CISL’s Summer Internships in Parallel Computational Science (SIParCS) Program is a prototype partnership between NCAR’s supercomputing center and selected universities. It offers a significant opportunity to make a positive impact on the quality and diversity of the workforce needed to use and operate 21st century supercomputers.
SIParCS targets students with a background in computational science, applied mathematics, computer science, or the computational geosciences. The program endeavors to provide opportunities for these exceptional students to gain practical experience with a wide variety of parallel computational science problems by working with the high performance computing systems and applications related to NCAR’s Earth System science mission. Ultimately, SIParCS aspires to help address shortages of trained scientists and engineers capable of maintaining and using these high-end systems to achieve the goals of 21st century computational geoscience research. The internships are 10-12 weeks in duration.
As is true for NCAR’s other labs, EOL is strongly engaged in science education at all levels. EOL conducted a small pilot program that exposes local high school students of high academic caliber to various EOL activities and specialized projects. In FY2007, EOL hired a Boulder High School senior to work with data collected from the driftsonde during the T-AMMA campaign in Africa last year.
In addition to our efforts with students of all ages, NCAR hosts numerous national and international workshops and colloquia. Among them is Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences’ (IMAGe) Theme-of-the-Year (TOY), which focuses on a particular area of the geosciences or applied mathematics that impact NCAR’s scientific mission. The FY 2007 TOY focused on Statistics for Numerical Models. Numerical models are vital to simulate geophysical, chemical, and ecological processes and to understand the relationship among components in the Earth system. As models have become larger and more complex, their construction, validation, and analysis are no longer amenable to simple approaches and statistical summaries. Statistical science has advanced in the past 20 years to handle the interpretation of complicated multivariate, spatial, and temporal data sets, and it is well suited to tackle the massive outputs from numerical experiments that are now the norm in the geosciences. The goals of this TOY are to match cutting-edge statistical methods to the needs of geophysical model development and to make statistical scientists aware of the particular scientific issues and research in the geophysical modeling community.
Click to enlarge.This excerpt from an image of total integrated global water vapor was produced from data generated by the CCSM CAM3 model and shows a well-developed tropical cyclone over the Indian Ocean. Animations produced from images like this are used in presentations and other education and outreach efforts to help foster public awareness and understanding of the atmospheric and related sciences.
Additionally, many of CISL’s outreach efforts are conducted through its Visualization Lab, a visual supercomputing facility that supports collaborative technologies, data analysis and visualization, and theater-style presentations in wide-format, high-resolution, stereo 3D. In FY2007, the Visualization Lab staff continued its successful partnership with NCAR’s Public Visitor Program and supported approximately 180 presentations, AccessGrid sessions, and general meetings involving over 2,100 participants (a 25% increase from last year). These events included presentations to K-12 audiences, scientific and corporate visitors, and government officials including VIP visitors from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Management and Budget, NOAA, the British Foreign Consulate, and the Chinese Government, to name a few. The CISL Visualization Lab also continued its important role as an outreach liaison with film and television organizations by providing a venue for television interviews with NCAR staff and by developing digital media that was used in productions by the Weather Channel, Seoul Broadcasting System, NBC WeatherPlus, and the Discovery Channel, among others.
The last highlight for this priority is to note that at the first NSF Facilities Users’ workshop occurred in late September 2007 at NCAR (see Goal 5, priority 1 for additional workshop details), as an education and outreach component, EOL presented tutorials for students and early-career scientists on our facility request process.
FY2008 Plans for Strategic Priority 2
Among the FY2008 plans:
In FY2008, ASP will make eight to 15 Graduate Visitor Program appointments, will develop and host another summer colloquium and the annual Junior Faculty Forum of Future Scientific Directions. ASP support will also be provided to the AIMES Young Scholars Network (YSN). SERE/ASP plan to pursue joint projects with the University of Colorado Diversity Initiative in areas of Postdoctoral Preparation Workshops, and SERE will continue supporting the ECSA, as well as individual early career scientists through administration of travel and visitor programs. In addition, SERE/CCB will develop and expand research and educational programs on climate and ethics by convening a high-level workshop with Minority Serving Institutions in partnership with Dillard University located in New Orleans, LA, and organize and convene a workshop designed to enhance diversity in the geosciences.
CISL places a high priority on its SIParCS program, and will continue its development in FY2008/2009. CISL plans to further broaden the candidate pool by running an open solicitation for all positions. In FY2008, our budget for the visitor program will increase to maintain eight to 10 summer intern positions across CISL, and it also plans to further integrate visitor activities by including travel support for a carefully chosen number of visiting scientists.
Based on the advice of the IMAGe advisory board and the support of NCAR’s scientific community in the turbulence program, the next TOY will be titled Geophysical Turbulent Phenomena. This program is co-directed by Annick Pouquet and Professor Keith Julien (University of Colorado, Applied Mathematics Department). In this effort, IMAGe will also partner with the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, an NSF Mathematics Institute. Planned 2008 workshops include:
- Observation and Experimentation
- Theoretical Methodology and Modeling
- Computational Methods, Scientific Computing and Visualization
- Turbulence Summer School for cross-disciplinary training in mathematical, computational, atmospheric and ocean sciences
EOL’s pilot high school internship effort will, pending evaluation, also continue.
ESSL will begin two activities in FY2008, breakfast meetings between the lab Director and young scientists will take place on a monthly basis; and, a targeted program to get post-doctoral fellows acquainted at depth with large modeling activities at NCAR will be the second focus. This latter will be progressively put in place in conjunction with the NCAR directorate. This new program will initiate momentum for the Earth System Model development and will be carried forward for years to come.
Support from NCAR in FY2008 for education and outreach activities offered by UCAR EO will support ongoing successful programs, as well as new initiatives begun in 2007. The NCAR Undergraduate Leadership Workshop–the seventh in the series–is planned for June 16-20. NCAR will also continue to support the NESTA office and journal. During 2008, the NCAR Online Education Climate Discovery course sequence will be completed and offered in its entirety at least once over the course of the fiscal year, and perhaps more frequently if staffing and demand allows.
UCAR EO also continues to be committed to professional development workshops for teachers across the country at NSTA meetings in Detroit (October), Denver (November), Birmingham (December), and Boston (March), as well as organizing and offering the AGU GIFT workshop for teachers in San Francisco. These workshops will highlight our extensive resources in climate and global change education, and International Polar Year-related resources, which have been developed with NCAR’s support. Additional opportunities to offer professional development workshops will arise over the course of the year, and we will participate if staffing and funding allow.
Related Lab Annual Report Sections:
Goal 3, Priority 2