Twenty-four hours of continuous daylight confuses one’s body clock. After chasing the sun from Portland, Maine, to Anchorage and landing with a colorful sunset at 11:51 p.m. Alaska time, I wasn’t sure if it was time to eat, sleep or start my day. Luckily, on the ride from the airport to the dorm I’d occupy during my time in Anchorage, my cab driver cleared up my confusion by sharing, “In Alaska, we like to say”¦there is always time to sleep in winter.”
There were two reasons for my trip to Alaska this past June. To start, Anchorage hosted the annual National Marine Education Association conference. As Education Associate at the Island Institute, I presented on the STORMS project (Students & Teachers Observing & Recoding Meteorological Systems) that ran in island and coastal Maine schools during the 2010-2011 school year. STORMS was a pilot program with the intention to increase weather and climate content knowledge in K-8 students through collecting local weather data, using GPS technology and by interviewing elders in their town about past weather events. I shared the successes of STORMS with folks at the conference, and also shared that the National Science Foundation had recently agreed to fund a new project, an evolution of STORMS: WeatherBlur. This brings me to the second reason for my trip: we were hoping that some Alaskan school groups would be interested to partner with us on the WeatherBlur project.
At first, the task seemed daunting: recruit teachers in Alaska willing to meet with me, a stranger from Maine, under the pretext that they would participate in a Maine-based education program, with about one month’s notice. Not only did we need a community with interested teachers, but also fishermen and scientists. In a nutshell, WeatherBlur will create a learning community of students, teachers, fishermen and scientists—all of whom will share weather and earth science-related data, images, videos and observations on an interactive website. Luckily, Institute staff has been working with Alaskan fisheries groups for a few years through the Community Fisheries Network, and after several calls and emails, all signs pointed to Sitka.
For our Maine communities who participated in STORMS, weather and storm events were key topics that led to conversations and collaborations between K-8 grade students and older community members, some of whom had never had a connection to the school before. As the topic of weather unified people within STORMS communities, it also helped bridge the islands—so to speak—so that by the end of the project students from Isle au Haut were ecstatic to see comments on their weather blog posts from fishermen in Friendship and students on North Haven. WeatherBlur hopes to take this one step further—actually, many steps further—and connect Maine and Sitka students and fishermen in a conversation about place and environment.
Sitka is a small city on Baranof Island in southeast Alaska. It is the fourth largest city in the state. Sitka’s size may be relative depending on where you come from, but after saying, “I heard Sitka has 12 miles of road,” I learned quite matter-of-factly that “No, dear, Sitka has 14 miles of road, and we’re proud of every one of ’em,” from a local fishermen.
Sitka faces transportation challenges not unlike the islands on the coast of Maine. Alaskan Airlines services Sitka multiple times a day through Juneau; the flight lasts about 35 minutes. The other option is the Alaskan Marine Highway, which, according to their website, is an eight-hour, 45-minute trek from Juneau.
The similarities I noticed went beyond the nature of island living. I met with teachers from the two elementary schools on Sitka, folks from the Sitka Sound Science Center and the Sitka Island Institute, as well as members of the fishing community—some of which were scheduled meetings and some of which were happenstance conversations on barstools. Through these conversations I learned that Sitka, not unlike Maine, went through a rough period when their pulp mill closed in the ’90s. In Sitka, people wear Carhartt and Grundens, and respond with constrained resentment when asked, “What do you do here in winter?” At the bar, they debate the various attributes of bait—greasy or not seemed to be the hot topic when I was there. And what about weather? Sitka Island Institute’s Dorik Mechau listened quietly as I described WeatherBlur and the connections I hoped to foster between our respective communities. After a long pause, he crossed his arms and said, “Weather. Weather is of real interest here.”
WeatherBlur is starting this fall in an experimental year to test out the online platform that communities will use to communicate. It will be fully implemented during the 2013-2014 school year.