Your Facilitators

Audio transcript:

Greetings, everyone, from Boulder, Colorado. I’m Bruce Muller, senior instructional designer at COMET. It’s Sunday, November 2, around noon. And here’s the current view looking towards Boulder from nearby Louisville.

Winter is about to hit us and to add to the snow on the peaks to the west. Tonight’s forecast is calling for up to 15cm in the mountains. I'm psyched that ski season is coming!

Looking at this current shot of our local weather reminds me of why I wanted to have a discussion with this community about conceptual models. On so many levels, the weather is such a visual, apparently simple manifestation of physical processes. I look out that window, I look at those mountains, and I see those clouds and say hey, snows coming. Yet, as we all know, behind those physical processes are sometime very complicated interactions with many variables coming into play; and most are not readily visible for easy interpretation. That’s where all those intricate equations come into play, the ones meteorology students had to tackle while in school. They represent the physical processes and allow us to interpret the physical in a logical, quantifiable manner. Yet relating the quantifiable directly to the physical is not always easy. Add the complexity of time into those equations and things get seriously complex. And so we simplify the complex and create conceptual models. These allow us to put the abstract equations to the side and to instead visualize processes in a simplified manner. As we create simple models of many processes, we combine those to begin to string together a model of the dynamic atmosphere as a whole.

I’m not a meteorologist and I never learned the equations that define our atmospheric processes. So these simplified models are what I rely on to gain a bit of insight on what forecasters are pondering at the desk everyday. I sometimes wonder how my interpretation of those simple ideas compare to a master forecaster. How many more variables do they take into consideration when they look at today’s picture of the weather? How many simplified concepts do they layer, one upon the other, to formulate their model of the current weather? And how do they extrapolate that over time to make a forecast?

I also wonder how we, as trainers, can help forecasters keep their conceptual models up to date, enhance them, and to evolve them to be as closely aligned with the real world as possible? Because the more a forecaster can think along the lines of how the atmosphere moves, the better their forecasts will be, the better they’ll be able to catch the model forecast gone wrong.

Over the next 3 weeks, this CALMet session will focus on conceptual models. In week 1, we would like to hear your stories and thoughts about conceptual models. In week 2, we’ll share a pretty compelling research article about the need for forecasters to evolve and maintain their mental model of the atmosphere. And in week 3, we’ll work together to gather resources for using conceptual models in our training as well as identify resources that we need to develop.

I hope you have the chance to contribute your thoughts to this session. Marianne Weingroff, a colleague and fellow instructional designer here at COMET, will be co-facilitating. Cheers!