It’s all about weather Hmm ... talk about weather, and sizzling hot and humid days come to one’s mind, especially to those living in hot regions of our country. Perhaps with every passing year we feel like summers are getting hotter than the previous years, which is likely with the alarming changes in global weather.

But kids, as you are on vacation, you may have ample time to explore what is affecting earth and its weather, either from books or through internet. In the meantime, we have picked up a safe learning site about weather for you this week — scijinks.gov, a site which is all about weather.

This is a joint National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) educational website that puts fun and adventure into learning about weather, satellite meteorology, and Earth science.

It’s all about weather

The website is clean and with its cool blue and white theme colours it is pretty appealing to the eye. You can find the main menu at the left with categories like Topics, Answers, Games, Dispatches, Multimedia, People, Educators and Adventure which are all self-explanatory and you can dig in yourself. But interestingly, all these categories have a drop down list of more sub-topics in them; for instance, in ‘Answers’ you can find weather, hurricane and storms, clouds, water, ice, tides and oceans, atmosphere, seasons, satellites and technology. Click any and you get questions with their answers in brief simple text, with animations, pictures and other multimedia.

Games on the site are also very interesting and as you play, you learn how weather changes, what causes lightening to strike by playing the related game or you can use satellite sensor data to guide planes around hazards this and a lot more interesting games.

You can go through galleries of beautiful images of clouds, oceans, celestial events, glaciers, tornado space weather, etc., and can learn about peoples in the fields of weather like researchers, engineers, satellite controllers, metriologists in ‘People.’

In short, all the informative articles that answer important questions about weather, timely stories about weather in the news, profiles of fun weather jobs, mobile and web games about satellites and technology, exciting videos and tonnes of downloadable content are focussed to middle- and high-school aged kids and their educators.

To explore everything related to weather: https://scijinks.gov/

Published in Dawn, Young World June 17th, 2017