The Educational Role of School Weather Station

School weather station is a special type of meteorological station with a special target group and giving top priority to educational significance. It is mainly designed to create an intuitive platform for meteorological observation and learning.

When learning meteorological knowledge, students can use the equipment such as thermometers, hygrometers and rain gauges in the weather station to experience the process of collecting meteorological data firsthand. For example, they can understand the variation law of air temperature with the solar altitude angle by reading the air temperature data at different times. Meanwhile, it can also cultivate students' practical abilities. Students can participate in the daily maintenance and data recording work, learn to clean and calibrate the instruments, and conduct simple meteorological analysis based on the data, thus exercising their hands-on, exploratory and data processing thinking abilities.

School weather stations are relatively small in scale, with miniaturized and targeted equipment. They are equipped with basic instruments that are easy for students to operate and understand, such as dry and wet bulb thermometers, anemometers, and rain gauges. The accuracy of these devices meets the teaching requirements but is lower than that of professional equipment. The selection of these devices focuses more on enabling students to observe meteorological elements intuitively. Moreover, due to serving teaching purposes, the cost of the equipment is relatively low, and mostly simple and cost-effective instruments are adopted.

The data of school weather stations are mainly used for teaching and scientific research activities within the school. The degree of data sharing is low. Generally, it is only shared within a small range in the school or in specific popular science and scientific research cooperation projects. Different from professional meteorological stations that widely share data for forecasting and research, school weather stations focus more on teaching analysis. Teachers can design teaching cases based on it, such as analyzing the impact of multi-year temperature data on the campus ecological environment to guide students to carry out research-based learning.