During the past two years teams of eighth grade students at
Charleston Middle School used a Nikon Coolpix 4300 Digital Camera and
an Apple iBook laptop computer to capture images of clouds. The
students learned to identify the various cloud types as recognized by
the National Weather Service and constructed a digital image
collection using iPhoto. The collection has been placed online for
use as learning tool for studying the weather, and it will be under
continuous development and expansion by future CMS students.
Prairie Skies is part of a collaborative effort between Argonne National Laboratory, Eastern Illinois University, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurment Program, and Charleston Middle School, titled the Atmospheric Visualization Collection (AVC). AVC is a component of the NSF National Science Digital Library. The hardware and software used for the project was funded by the PT3 grant program at Eastern Illinois University.
Special thanks to Dr. Belayet Khan, Dr. Keith Andrew, Dr. Gail Lockart, and Dr. Brian Reid at EIU, and to Chris Klaus at Argonne National Laboratory for their assistance with this project. Thanks also to Dr. John "The Cloudman" Day for the autographed cloud poster, and to Jim Allsopp from the National Weather Service for the individual cloud charts.
Please direct any comments, suggestions, or corrections to Tim McCollum, Charleston Middle School.