Each 5th Grade Nature Academy student can measure weather data at the Boone County Nature School. One class of 5th-graders will visit the Weather Station each morning to collect data on air temperature, barometric pressure, precipitation, wind speed and direction, and relative humidity. These data will be used to make a weather prediction for the day, which the class will present to the rest of the students at BCNS.
This experience offers students the opportunity to utilize tools for measurement that may be unfamiliar to them and to develop an understanding of how patterns in measurement are used to develop predictions in Missouri weather. The approach to weather predicting used at BCNS was originally developed by Raymond M. Sager, who spent four decades as a meteorologist for the New York Daily News from the 1930s to the 1970s. Sager published his work in The Sager Weathercaster in 1969 (out of print). The algorithms utilized to develop present-day weather predictions are modeled after Sager’s revolutionary ideas for predicting weather.
At BCNS, students will use a weather wheel modeled after Sager’s Weathercaster to turn their data into a weather prediction.
The BCNS Weather Station was modeled after the Weather Station at the Grand Smoky Mountain Institute at Tremont in Tennessee. For more information, visit the Weather Monitoring page on the GSMIT website.
