The Bigger Picture
How do you make weather interactive?
There are currently TWO weather-related museums and experiences in the United States that aren’t storm-chasing tours. TWO. Neither are truly interactive, immersive experiences.
The first is the National Weather Museum and Science Center in Norman, Oklahoma. The other is dedicated to the Twister/Twisters Movies. Everything else is a single exhibit, one point of contact within a greater entity. It’s not enough.
The vision is simple, actually making it happen is a journey.
Step 1: Identify the elements that build weather. Temperature. Wind. Topography. All of it.
Step 2: Take each individual element and break it down. How do we make it interactive? How do we make it easy to understand regardless of age? How do we keep it relevant as technology improves?
Step 3: Funding and Design. Weather technology is expensive. Can we build it cheaper? Can we take relics (the old DOWs for example) and give them new life? Would organizations be interested in donating or contributing? Can we liaise with storm chasers and meteorologists?
Step 4: Gamifying Weather & Atmospheric Science. If there’s 80 chasers on a single storm, and even 5% of those have data collection devices, can we get that raw data and build it into a predictive model that can be interacted with on an individual level? What if we could access that data on the fly and allow kids, adults, anyone interested in the weather to actively manipulate the data in-line with current and/or past weather events?
This is a big one, I want to build an interactive but accurate model for people to play with. If they move a slide and the dew point increases into the 70’s, does that increase the likelihood of storm development or does the jet stream need to dip another ten degrees for more storms to fire up? A predictive model, not accurate enough for chasing, but real enough to get people thinking. To allow them to play with the data, the numbers and see real results. Most folks see a tornado and think ‘magic’ or ‘monster’. They don’t understand the cocktail recipe. I want to show them the ingredients. If I can get little Susie to see that its a combination of elements that dictate how a storm acts, I’m not just entertaining them, I’m educating the next generation of meteorologists and weather fanatics.
Maybe little Susie manages, somehow, to find all the right data points to spawn a “tornado” in the middle of downtown. If she lives on Main Street and builds a tornado onto her street, does she understand the difference between a watch and a warning? Does she know where to take her cat when the sirens go off? Does she realize that standing on the porch with her iPhone is a bad idea because she ran the simulation? If I can make it real for them, I can help them learn, then fewer people die in the next storm. That’s something our current weather system struggles with every day.
It stopped being about the thrill of the hunt a long time ago, its about protection, its about knowledge, its about building something bigger and better and able to be taken into the future to help the next generation.
Step 5: Building Buy-In. How do I garner support? Who holds the backbone? How do I return to a community that I left after 2011? Want to be part of the process? It starts here. Now.