This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from MESO, Inc. addresses the opportunity to utilize advanced atmospheric simulation technology for teaching atmospheric and related earth sciences at the university, high school and middle school levels and for use at weather forecasting training centers and by the general public. The overall objective is to provide students at various educational and experience levels with a mechanism to develop problem solving skills as they learn about the earth-atmosphere system. This will be accomplished by developing a software system, termed the Virtual Atmospheric Laboratory (VAL), that will allow students to easily conduct and analyze realistic atmospheric experiments involving complex solar, terrestrial and atmospheric dynamical interactions. The secondary objective is demonstrate feasibility of running the experiments on a low-cost desktop computer making this educational tool available to every student The VAL will be an integration of several technological components, including: (1) sophisticated physics-based atmospheric numerical models; (2) visualization tools which permit the user to interactively examine and animate complex multidimensional datasets; (3) graphical user interfaces which allow the user to easily navigate through and control complex computer programs; and (4) hypertext instructional databases which permit the user to pursue threads of knowledge through the use of words and phrases which are linked to other parts of an instructional database or even other databases. The Phase I research will (1) evaluate a conceptual VAL prototype in an actual university-level instructional setting; (2) establish the educational objectives and functional design for the fully-functional VAL for a broad range of educational levels; and (3) determine the computational feasibility of hosting the VAL on a low-cost computational platform. A successful completion of the Phase I research will develop a working prototype on a UNIX workstation, demonstrate the computational feasibility on Windows- and Macintosh-based platforms and illustrate the instructional utility of the VAL concept in order to provide the foundation for the development of the a more sophisticated fully-functional VAL in Phase II. The primary commercial application for the Virtual Atmospheric Laboratory will be as an educational tool used by middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, government weather forecasting training centers, and government and commercial `field` weather forecasters. Other VAL applications which have potential to generate commercial revenue include use as: (1) a low-cost research tool and data generator for meteorologists and non-meteorologists investigating atmosphere-related problems; (2) a home atmospheric laboratory for weather hobbyists and general science enthusiasts; and (3) a real-time high resolution local weather forecast system.
