I’m delighted that my “Up in the Air” installation has been adopted by the Met Office as part of its Foundation Climate course for early career scientists and software engineers.
For one week in October 2023, the course director Rosanna Amato turned one of the meeting rooms at the Met Office HQ in Exeter into a 3D graph to recreate the installation. It was available to anyone visiting the building for enjoyment and exploration as well as to the course attendees on the first day of their three-week course.
Rosanna made a few changes to my original installation, including:
- The Met Office’s social Crochet and Knitting etc (CAKE) group crocheted the atoms
- The poster statistics for each greenhouse were sourced from IPCC AR6 where possible (otherwise unchanged)
- Learners were tasked to ‘complete the graph’: some molecules were strung in place in the 3D graph; four needed to be matched with their correct string, using the information on the posters, and so hung in the correct X-Y-Z location
- The Fair Weather Friends game was used in the training, but there was not enough time to play Turn Up Trumps
- For general interest, but not used in the training, each greenhouse gas poster had a QR code linking to a survey about sources of the gas, with responses forming a word cloud
According to Rosanna, verbal feedback from the learners was emphatically positive, “particularly from dyslexic colleagues who found the interactive, immersive learning style to be highly effective, engaging, and enjoyable.”
I worked for the Met Office between 2000 and 2009. My last job was project managing the production of the UK Climate Projections 2009 and I’ve retained an interest in climate.
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Many thanks to Rosanna Amato, the director of the Foundation Climate course at the Met Office.
Photo credits: Rosanna Amato and Penny Endersby.
