Tag der Physik@LMU (22.07.2017)
On July 22th 2017 a few Early Career Scientists from the meteorological institute at the LMU (including W2W researchers) offered a workshop to 15 high school students for the “Tag der Physik@LMU”.
The workshop aimed at explaining atmospheric physics, numerical weather prediction and the propagation of model errors to the students. Based on the article of Charlton-Perez and Dacre (2011), the students produced a simplified weather forecast over Germany.
An introduction about atmospheric physics, numerical weather prediction, and observations was given to the students. Each was then assigned a city in Germany, which represented a grid cell of a model, and computed the temperature at the grid cell for several timesteps. To perform the calculation, communication with the neighbors (i.e. with the neighboring grid cells) was necessary, making the activity a team effort.
At the end of the workshop, the temperature values calculated by the students were visualized and compared with the values obtained by a computer model. Differences between the two forecasts were discussed.