RESOURCES: EDUCATION
Severe Weather Education
What is a Meteotsunami? The Coastal Management Program (CMP) has made an educational fact sheet of the severe weather phenomenon on the Great Lakes known as meteotsunami, a tsunami-like wave caused by weather systems. (pdf)
How Do You Make a Tornado? CoCoRaHS provides an experiment demonstrating the power of tornadoes by allowing students to create mini tornados in a water bottle. Students are told to place small objects in the water tornado to demonstrate the destructive power of a tornado at a small, safe scale. (pdf)
Making Lightning: In Your Mouth! This experiment from CoCoRaHS demonstrates how lightning is created. Students are able to create "lightning in their mouth" by biting into a wintergreen lifesaver. (pdf)
Severe Weather 101 NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) has created a list of educational pages that discuss the development and impact of various aspects of severe weather (i.e. thunderstorms, tornadoes, lightning, floods, hail, damaging winds, winter weather).
Connect with Weather Virtual Field Trip This webpage from Discovery Education provides virtual videos and hands-on activities for the classroom for Hurricanes, Winter Storms & Ice, Tornadoes, and Wildfires. This page is unique because the virtual videos for hurricanes and tornadoes show using visual effects the type of damage expected at the various scales of wind speeds - they are definitely worth a watch and would be great for the classroom!
NWS HotSeat: Warning Decision Simulator To give students a realistic feel on what it is like to forecast, this webpage from the Peachtree City, Georgia National Weather Service office gives the opportunity to work through various forecasting scenarios as a "game". Example scenarios include a severe weather outbreak, an outbreak of large hail and tornadoes across the Atlanta metropolitan area, or severe storms striking in Chicago in August 2008.
Tornadoes 101 Video A video from National Geographic (2 minutes, 46 seconds) that discusses how tornadoes form and how to get out of their way.
Weather WizKids: Tornadoes This webpage on tornadoes from Weather WizKids is geared toward a younger audience and includes basic tornado information. At the bottom of the page, some tornado activities are also highlighted.
Winter Storms This activity from The Weather Channel gives students grades 3-5 the opportunity to survey family and community members to discover the worst winter storms in their community. For students grades 6-8, they will use the winter safety tips information provided to create a quick to administer to community members. (pdf)
Winter Weather Teaching Box This Winter Weather Teaching Box from Spark science education is a themed collection of classroom-ready and standards-aligned activities, content, and multimedia that build student understanding of science, technology, engineering, and math in the context of winter weather.