[ad_1]
It’s 11:30 a.m., break at the Government Boys Higher School in Tirur, a coastal town in Malappuram district of Kerala state. Jelwa Issa CB, Hanouna and Abiram A, class 12 humanities students, exit their classroom with their pens and writing paper and get down to work under cloudy skies. Their task today: to log weather data for the last 24 hours into a school weather station (SWS).
For just over a year, children in Kerala’s schools have been making their mark every day, rain or shine. They are your local meteorologist, recording 24-hour rainfall, humidity, wind speed and direction data, and using that to understand accurate weather and climate patterns.
A wind vane and an anemometer, instruments for measuring wind direction and speed respectively, were installed on the school porch. (express photo)
The school in Tirur is among the 258 schools in the state where weather stations have been installed by the Samagra Shiksha Kerala (SSK) of the Department of Public Education. Under the project, funded entirely by SSK, each school has been allocated Rs 78,000, with all instruments for the weather station designed to standards set by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD).
With the aim of imparting practical lessons to school students, SWS is an educational project unique in the country in which as a part social science students, who have geography as an elective subject in grades 11 and 12, collect daily weather data.
Among the instruments at the school’s weather station is a rain gauge of the unrecorded type, which displays the total precipitation over a specified period of time. (express photo)
At the Terror School, where the data has been collected since April this year, the students do it under the supervision of a geography teacher. They first head to the fenced area on the school premises where the SWS is installed. The enclosure contains an unrecorded-type rain gauge (which displays the total precipitation over a set period of time), a six-minimum thermometer (which can record the maximum and minimum temperatures reached over a period of time) and a wet and dry thermometer installed inside the display Stevenson (to check temperature sensors from exposure to direct or reflected sunlight and other external sources). Besides, on the porch of the school is a wind vane and a cup anemometer, which are instruments for measuring wind direction and speed.
Terror School weather station. The tools are installed in a container inside the building. (express photo)
As the children easily go on with their work and record the data in their notebooks, their Geography teacher Suresh Kumar S. says, “This is the best way to teach the children climate and weather. This project helped create a climate culture and enthusiasm for geography among the students. We have been recording data since April 1 and our students are attending Every day, even during the summer holidays, to measure the weather data.They have even been trained to look at data for the month of June, for example, and talk about how erratic it has rained in Tirur over the past month.
His students then input the weather data for the day into an observation chart in the school office, before moving to the corridor and jotting down the data on the whiteboard. Today’s results: maximum temperature of 30 degrees Celsius. minimum 27 ° C; relative humidity 67 percent; precipitation 0; wind speed 2 km per hour; Wind direction: northwest.
A wet and dry thermometer for measuring humidity was installed inside the Stevenson display. (express photo)
SSK State Project Manager A.R. Supriya said the school’s weather stations sparked a lot of curiosity not only among the students, but also among the locals. “We have many local self-government bodies in contact with schools and requesting daily weather reports so that they can be alert to weather patterns in their area. We are planning to create an online platform to share and analyze data with the public. Before that, we have to make sure that the data is authentic and that all stations are functioning in a manner We will soon come up with a system to aggregate data from all of these weather stations so that we can have insight into precipitation and other weather patterns in different parts of the state.
Ali Rasal, a class 12 student of Tirur School, said the weather station helped him better understand and appreciate weather conditions and patterns. He said, “People who know about the weather station at our school ask us about today’s weather.”
His colleague Rahima Tee said, “Now we are constantly looking at weather reports and climate news. We are also looking at related topics, for example, when we hear about a cyclone in Gujarat. It has expanded our learning.”
SSK officials said the idea for the weather stations came up during a discussion about how to get students interested in the social sciences. That year, Kerala students scored particularly poorly on the subject of the National Achievement Survey. A statewide brainstorming session with teachers revealed that social science students usually find geography a difficult subject. What followed was a decision to set up laboratories, with dioramas on the solar system, in a few schools in the state.
SSK Project Consultant and former State Program Officer Suresh Kumar AK recalls, “In 2021, we decided to move these labs to a higher level, which led to the idea of weather stations. The 2018 and 2019 floods in Kerala brought more focus on weather monitoring at the micro level. And so we decided to launch weather stations in 258 senior secondary schools where geography is taught.
In 2022, SSK put together a 10-member core team of senior high school geography teachers, who consulted IMD and the Water Resources Development and Management Center – Kozhikode on setting up school weather stations. In October last year, 44 geography teachers were trained by the Advanced Center for Aerial Radar Research (ACARR) at Kochi University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) on installation, maintenance, data collection and data analysis of the proposed weather stations.
Dr S Abhilash, Director of ACARR, said the data from 250 individual stations has “enormous potential, even more so because we have had local rainfall periods in recent years. This will help to get a better understanding at the micro level of rain patterns. A must for all schools Ensuring that data is correct and recorded each day.Although the system cannot be compared to the IMD mechanism, the school stations serve the purpose of an unofficial weather observatory at ground level.Besides creating greater climate awareness among students and communities, it could fill a gap Data in `weather watch`.
[ad_2]
