Chesapeake Bay watershed area and Minnesota weathercasters scheduled for separate full-day workshop briefings on climate science.

Broadcast meteorologists from Chesapeake Bay area watershed states and from Minnesota will be meeting for two full-day climate science workshops over the next two and one-half months in two separate programs.

Climate Central is supporting the Chesapeake Bay workshop March 30 and 31 in Oxford, Maryland, with invited weathercasters coming from stations in Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Philadelphia, Pa. In Minnesota, the Science Museum of Minnesota, in St. Paul, in mid-June is sponsoring a similar workshop for weathercasters across that state.

The broadcast meteorologists workshops are the fifth and sixth in a continuing series* of full-day climate science “immersion” workshops designed to help meteorologists feel more comfortable with the increasing number of questions many are getting, on- and off-air, concerning possible connections between weather anomalies and a warming climate.

In all the workshops, a faculty of regional and national expert climatologists, meteorologists, and local faculty experts cover issues ranging from the role and influence of solar radiation to similarities and differences in weather and climate models. And in each workshop, local experts help meteorologists better understand projected regional impacts of a warming climate on weather events ranging from incidence and severity of weather anomalies to drought, flooding, or wild fires.

In addition to local university faculties, the by-invitation workshops also draw on nationally known climate scientists who have a demonstrated interest and skill in communicating with the broad public and with those, such as meteorologists, most looked to by the public for information on weather and climate issues.

Previous such workshops, with funding provided by independent foundations and by nongovernmental science organizations, have been held at The Field Museum in Chicago; as a part of the American Meteorological Society’s 2009 Portland, Oregon, annual broadcast meteorologists meeting; at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Miami; and at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Meteorology, in Norman.

Additional information on the workshops is available by contacting bud@yaleclimatemediaforum.org.

Editor’s Disclosure: The workshops featured in this news note are managed by the Editor of the Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media.