‘Met Lab’ in High Schools for Climate Study
Following are excerpts from a New Indian Express report.
Global warming and the changing weather pattern would not just be confined to textbooks.
Soon, students would be recording Meteorological observations. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), New Delhi would fund this ambitious mission – Participation of Youth in Real-time Observation to Benefit Education (Probe).
About 70 high schools have already been identified for establishment of ‘Met labs’ where students would be involved for monitoring weather pattern. These schools are mostly based in coastal belt and interior pockets worst hit by the changing climate.
…Probe’s success is expected to provide climatologists with clinical inputs of region-specific weather parameters and help farmers and fishermen gather online weather information.
Uttarakhand, one of the first States to adopt it, exemplifies Probe’s success. ‘Today, these schools have literally pushed aside the Meteorological department by providing region-specific information to media for their weather column,’ said Prof S K Das of IIT, Delhi, who was one of the team members in DST to frame the programme.
…These centres are likely to be set up at the Department of Marine Science, Berhampur University, IMMT and KIIT. The labs would be connected to the resource centres and IMMT for data transmission.
January 15th, 2008
