CW3E Hosts 5th Grade Students for Outreach Event on Scripps Pier
May 2, 2024
radiosonde while preparing a weather balloon for launch
On Tuesday, April 30th, CW3E staff hosted 90 students from the San Diego Unified School District for an educational outreach event on the Scripps Pier. The group included three classes of 5th grade students from the Chollas Creek Elementary School. During their visit to campus, CW3E staff spoke with the students about their research into atmospheric rivers and other types of high-impact precipitation conducted by our researchers. This event was hosted as part of an ongoing collaboration with Groundwork San Diego’s EarthLab Program, with the goal of providing students hands-on learning opportunities related to research conducted by CW3E and our partners.
The outreach event consisted of three stations – including a weather-centric station on the Scripps Pier, a tide-pooling activity on the beach adjacent to Scripps campus, and an educational activity on Pawka Green. CW3E staff educated students on the important precipitation-related research conducted by the center, showed students the various weather sensing instruments employed by CW3E’s field team across California, and gave students hands-on demonstrations of our various equipment. Additionally, the students were able to participate in multiple weather balloon launch demonstrations from the pier, during which multiple students were able to help with the logistics of getting the balloon off the ground. Although these balloons were launched as part of an educational outreach event, their observations were transmitted in near real-time and assimilated into the global forecast models. In total, eight members of CW3E staff participated in this outreach event, including Ali Wolman, Jeri Wilcox, Adolfo Lopez-Miranda, Jacob Morgan, Sam Bartlett, Cody Poulsen, Pat Mulrooney, Shawn Roj, and Ricardo Vilela.
located on a weather stations CW3E maintains on the Scripps Pier