8: April
Students explore the causes and impacts of a notable weather event
Purpose
Students will use CoCoRaHS reporting features to identify a recent, notable, local precipitation event and try to connect it with a larger weather event. Alternatively, students will use a newsworthy precipitation event (not local) and trace its impacts on a particular location.
Have students first locate their station in the CoCoRaHS Data Explorer. Then, using the Precipitation Calendar for their station, have students find a day or consecutive days with unusually large precipitation of any type. After finding the precipitation event, students will use the CoCoRaHS Interactive Map and Condition Monitoring Report to explore precipitation patterns and conditions in the nation and in their region prior to and following the local event. Students will use what they learn from CoCoRaHS reporting tools and other resources (e.g., National Weather Service) to make and support a claim about whether their local event was part of a larger event.
Alternatively, if no local significant precipitation events have happened since the school year began, have students start with a newsworthy event elsewhere in the nation, for example, a hurricane, snowstorm, or flood. Instead of using their own station, have students first research the event to learn the date(s) and location(s) where it was most prominent. Then, have them use the CoCoRaHS Interactive Map, CoCoRaHS Data Explorer, and Condition Monitoring Report to describe the impacts of the event on a particular location.
Standards + Practices
Science
DCIs: ESS2.C The Roles of Water in Earth’s Surface Processes
ESS2.D Weather and Climate
CCC: Cause and Effect
SP7: Engaging in argument from evidence
Students will make claims about a weather event and support their claims with evidence. A Claim Evidence Reasoning approach is provided to help students construct their arguments.
Mathematics
MP1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
MP2: Reason abstractly and quantitatively
MP3: Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
Resources + Supports
Two Approaches to This Month’s Activity
Alternative 1: Ms. Clark’s students connect their data to a larger weather system
Using the Precipitation Calendar for their station (found in the CoCoRaHS Data Explorer), Ms. Clark reviewed all the observations recorded by her students this school year. She easily identified three significant precipitation events in their data and believed her students would be able to as well. At the beginning of the class period, she gave them a challenge: “You’ve been collecting and reporting precipitation data all year. Today, let’s see if we can find a time when we had an unusual amount of precipitation. You’ll be working in your groups, and you need to be ready to convince the other groups that you’ve found a big precipitation event.” Ms. Clark reminds students how to access CoCoRaHS Data Explorer and Precipitation Calendar for their small group. Students organize themselves in their small groups and get to work. After about five minutes, one group shouts out, “We’ve found it!” Ms. Clark encourages them to keep looking at their data and reminds them that they need to be able to convince everyone else that they’ve found something unusual. While they’re looking, she circulates and asks groups to try out their argument on her, asking them questions she thinks other students might ask but without telling them if they’re right or wrong. She tells one group, “It’s not up to me to decide if you’re right. You have to convince everyone with your data.” After about 15 minutes, all groups believe they’ve found an event in their data. She asks each group to give the date(s) of their event without any other information. It quickly becomes clear that they identified the same three events she did: a period of several consecutive days with light rain, two consecutive days with moderate rain, and one day with especially heavy rain. After each group reports, she asks, “So which event is the MOST unusual?” A lively but orderly debate follows, but the students can’t agree. Ms. Clark says, “Maybe that’s because they’re all unusual, just in different ways. Can we all agree on that?” The students seem satisfied, so she asks them to pick one event for the whole class to investigate further. They ultimately choose an event on February 12th and 13th because it had the most total precipitation across the event (1.50” one day, 1.15” the next). Additionally, the group that nominated this event also found a condition monitoring report dated February 16th from a station close by. The report helped convince everyone that the event was unusual. One of the students read the report to the class: “The 2.72″ received this week over several days brings us to 3.74″ for this month–above normal.”
Ms. Clark says, “Okay, great! Now I want you to work in your groups for the rest of the class period to figure out whether this was an isolated event that affected only us, or whether it was part of a bigger event that affected other people around us.” She encourages them to start with the CoCoRaHS Interactive Map, suggesting they explore the days before and after the event. She tells them they can use any other web-based resources they want to and reminds them that they need to be able to support their claim with evidence from their research. With five minutes to go in the period, students are still working. She tells them to quickly summarize in writing what their group has found so they can pick up where they left off the next day. Students enter the class the following day and get back to work. Ms. Clark circulates and asks groups to tell her what they’re finding. With 30 minutes to go in the period, she tells them to spend a few minutes preparing a two-minute summary of what they found. One group’s findings are summarized here: [link to PDF of this https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dwOYKOJ3KIUFbqDFU6L96HZx1fTP4in1mdDWBRltpk0/edit?usp=sharing].
After all the groups have presented, Ms. Clark praises their work, saying “Wow! You all found a lot about that event that I didn’t. So what do you think? Was our event part of something bigger?” All the students agree that it was. Ms. Clark wraps up, saying “Tomorrow, we’re going to think about everything we learned during our weather and climate unit in January and see if we can use what we learned to understand that event even better.”
Alternative 2: Ms. Clark’s students trace the impacts of a large storm on a single location
Near the beginning of the school year, Hurricane Helene hit the southern United States. Ms. Clark talked about it with her students at the time because she anticipated discussing it more during their weather unit later in the year. By April, students still hadn’t recorded any unusual amounts of precipitation in their own rain gauge, so she decided to have them research the impacts of Helene. She began by putting students in their small groups and asking them to look at a national view of the CoCoRaHS Interactive Map for September 25–29. (For convenience, screen shots of the maps are linked here [link to PDF of this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rIWS2hnGn8gZeMu5voi_pVG4ebTFjl4-xRRkma-XyrM/edit?usp=sharing]). The students are surprised at how much rain fell in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. One of the students says, “I heard on the news that Asheville, NC got hit really bad.” Other students had heard the same thing, so Ms. Clark asks them to spend a few more minutes researching Helene’s impacts on Asheville, then asks them what they learned. Students excitedly share what they learned. “They didn’t have electricity for weeks!” “Or water.” “Or cell phone service!” “I read that kids missed more than a month of school.” In a more somber tone, one student adds, “Yeah, and a lot of people died in the flooding.” Ms. Clark asks, “Why do you think it was so bad in Asheville?” Several students share their ideas, but no one is sure.
Ms. Clark says it might help them understand the impacts if they focused on one station’s readings during the storm. She asks them to use the CoCoRaHS Interactive Map to find a station in or near Asheville that submitted a report for all five days during September 25-29. She warns them it might be hard because people might not have been able to submit reports without electricity or cell phone service. Her students respond well to the challenge and eagerly get to work. After about 10 minutes, each group has found at least one station with complete data. Rather than asking the whole class to choose one station to focus on, she lets each group use the one they found, reasoning that the next part of the activity will be more interesting if students research different stations.
Ms. Clark says, “Okay, now that you’ve found a station, I want you to use the CoCoRaHS Interactive Map to learn what you can about the rainfall at that station during the storm. After about 10 minutes, she asks the groups to share what they’ve learned so far. One group reports, “Our station got 14.81 inches of rain over the five days, and 8.36 inches of it was on just one day.” Another group says, “Ours was close to that but a little less.” Ms. Clark asks, “Is that a lot of rain?” The students say it seems like a lot, but they’re not sure what is normal. With the class period ending, Ms. Clark says, “Tomorrow, we’ll keep using the CoCoRaHS Data Explorer to try to figure out if the amount of rain was unusual. Be sure to write down your station’s number so you can find it again tomorrow.”
The next day, Ms. Clark shows students how to find their station in the CoCoRaHS Data Explorer. She encourages them to look at data for their station in previous years and to use what they learn to support a claim about whether the amount of rain during Helene was unusual. As students begin exploring, they are at first overwhelmed by the amount of information available. Ms. Clark lets them struggle, confident that each group will eventually find useful information, even if they don’t all find the same information. Sure enough, after a few minutes, students have found their way around the Data Explorer and are looking at their station’s historical data. Ms. Clark circulates and answers questions students have about different terms they come across, but for the most part, they are able to figure them out on their own.
With about 15 minutes to go in the class period, the students show no signs of slowing down, and Ms. Clark has to call them back together to share what they learned. As she predicted, each group shares different information, but each one is able to support a claim that the amount of rain was unusual. For example, one group describes what they learned in the “Precipitation Summary” section of the Data Explorer, which compares their station’s reading to the 30-year averages. Another shows a graph from the “Year-Over-Year” section.
Ms. Clark asks, “So why do you think Helene affected Asheville so badly?” One student shares, “I think it was just so much more rain than they were used to that they weren’t prepared for it.” Another student says, “Yeah, I read somewhere that it was the worst flood in a thousand years.” Still another says, “And it probably didn’t help that they’re in the mountains.” Ms. Clark wraps up saying, “Wow, that’s a lot to think about. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about how cities try to prepare for floods, and we’ll think about how the terrain affects flooding. Great work today!”
Using a Claim-Evidence-Reasoning Approach to Construct an Argument
An important science practice is engaging in argument from evidence. This month’s engagement offers opportunities for students to try out the practice. They will analyze a large amount of data and will use what they learn to try to convince their classmates of their claims. The Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (C-E-R) framework can help students construct their argument, and it can provide a helpful connection to literacy as well. The following questions can help students think about each part of the framework. They are publicly available as a rubric from NSTA at this URL: https://static.nsta.org/connections/elementaryschool/201908CERRubric.pdf
| C-E-R Component and Guiding Questions | Examples from the Narrative (Alternative 1) Question: “Is our local event part of a larger system?” |
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Claim Does your claim answer the original question? Is it accurate and complete? |
“We think it is part of a larger event.” |
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Evidence Does the student provide appropriate and sufficient data to support the claim? |
“We looked at the interactive map for the whole US on those two days, plus the two days before and two days after. . . . We noticed a pattern of precipitation starting on Feb. 11 and appearing to move eastward through February 14. Our event falls right in the middle of that window.” |
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Reasoning Does the student include a justification that links the claim to the evidence using appropriate scientific principles? |
“We also went to the National Weather Service website and searched for weather news between February 12 and 14. We found this page: https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/storm_summaries/storm8/stormsum_1.html. It describes a large winter storm that affected much of the east coast. It says the storm is partly due to a low pressure system off the coast and front attached to that system. We learned in our weather unit that fronts are boundaries between different air masses and that precipitation often happens where the air masses meet.” |
Writing Prompts
By this point in the year, students probably understand that weather is influenced by many factors, some of which are constant (e.g., a mountain range) and some of which are constantly changing (e.g., ocean temperature). Consequently, predicting weather for a particular place and time is complex and uncertain. The NGSS puts it this way:
“Weather and climate are influenced by interactions involving sunlight, the ocean, the atmosphere, ice, landforms, and living things. These interactions vary with latitude, altitude, and local and regional geography, all of which can affect oceanic and atmospheric flow patterns. Because these patterns are so complex, weather can only be predicted probabilistically.”
Source: NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
The following writing prompts can be used for helping students make sense of the probabilistic nature of weather forecasting:
1. The weather forecast for Seattle, WA tomorrow says there is an 80% chance of rain. In your own words, write what that means.
Teacher note: This resource from the National Weather Service provides a list of ideas to look for in student responses. https://www.weather.gov/lmk/pops
2. Why are forecasts given in percentages? In other words, why don’t they say it absolutely will rain or absolutely will NOT rain?
Teacher note: Some ideas to look for in student responses:
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- Forecasts are given in percentages because meteorologists can never be absolutely certain about what the weather will be like.
- Meteorologists cannot be certain because the weather for a particular place and time depends on many factors.
- All of the factors that affect weather interact with each other.
- Some of the factors are constant (e.g., a large mountain range) while others are constantly changing (e.g., air pressure).
- All of these factors and their interactions make predicting the weather very complex and somewhat uncertain.
- Percentages are a way of communicating the uncertainty.
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Local Connections
Connecting with and finding local scientific support would be an authentic way to help students make connections with scientists that use CoCoRaHS data. Be intentional about finding connections to diverse scientists your students can relate to as you consider contacting either of the following local or national resources to aid students with their research:
- Connect with your State Climate Office here: https://stateclimate.org/state_programs/.
- Connect with a meteorologist through a local chapter of the American Meteorological Society here: https://chapters.ametsoc.org/
- Connect with a local TV weather reporter through a Google search.
Next month, students will begin working on a culminating project to communicate what they’ve learned about precipitation data collection and analysis. If you have time to begin sooner than that, it may be beneficial for your students to provide the extra time for them to get started. In addition, students will be generating investigatable questions and might need extra guidance. Prepare copies of the rubric from the assessment support to review with students prior to beginning the work. By sharing with students the identified outcomes students will have guidance as they prepare their final projects. The expert connections support also has ideas for connecting with and finding local scientific support for your students.