DIFAX as a teaching tool

Everyone,

Don's ranting (see below) supports my comments from last week when I
suggested that we teachers need to find new ways to teach and students
need to find new ways to learn.  Teachers should be exploring ways to
create exercises that will allow students to explore what generated the
vorticity to begin with, what factors change it, what it all has to do
with creating weather, and this can be done with apps like GEMPAK/GARP and
maybe even more effectively with NMAP that's part of the new release.  Or
how about a nice vorticity MetApp ?  It was always very hard to get these
concepts across with DIFAX maps, even though students got pretty good at
shading areas of PVA and NVA.

I still like the idea of having the surface analysis, the U/A maps and a
model or two hanging on the wall for students when they come into the lab,
want a quick look at the patterns, and pretend they can predict the
weather from a 30 second look at the maps :-)  And there are still
students who aren't as skilled at the computer as others.

So for a quick look at the current weather, DIFAX (or some kind of
hardcopy) is fine, but as a teaching tool, it's old technology and our
students deserve better.

> <RANT> 
> Additionally, from a pedagogical view, using the tools that
> Unidata provides to create and print custom displays seems a better
> alternative to using DIFAX anyway for exploring the atmosphere. We all
> went through the process of shading in areas of NVA and PVA on the
> NGM charts. Wouldn't it be better to use GEMPAK to generate maps with
> quantitative contours of NVA and PVA rather than use the subjective hand
> analyses? With DIFAX, the views are dictated by the products that the
> NWS creates. Those views haven't changed in 30 years, but our knowledge
> of how best to look at features has. The tools we have can generate
> the "old" views, but also new views (isentropic analyses, ensemble
> forecasts, etc).  Perhaps using them will help advance the knowledge
> and science.
> </RANT>

Tony 

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   Anthony A. Rockwood              Metropolitan State College of Denver    
   Meteorology Program              Dept.of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences 
   303.556.8399                     P.O. Box 173362, Campus Box 22
   address@hidden                Denver, CO  80217-3362                  
   fax: 303.556.4436                www.mscd.edu/~eas
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