Integration of undergraduate education and field campaigns: A case study from deep convective clouds and chemistry

The University of North Dakota (UND) partnered with the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) campaign, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)to provide undergraduate students with an experiential learning opportunity that uniquely integrated classroom activities, operational forecasting, and a large multiagency field campaign. The class forecasting experience was tailored specifically to the DC3 campaign by focusing on specialized regional convective forecasts using data from the previous spring's operations. The students developed criteria based on campaign goals and flight safety considerations that were deemed crucial for operations decisions: storm morphology, time of initiation, nearness to other storm complexes, and storm depth. The live briefings were also appreciated by the students as an opportunity to hear how campaigns are run and how their own discussions might compare with those by the DC3 forecast team. The course successfully utilized an experiential learning paradigm, providing students with experience in forecasting, field campaign decision making, and model evaluation.