It is a cliche that everyone remembers exactly where they were at the time they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot. For meteorologists of a certain age, a similar chronological beacon shining from the distant past is one's first sighting of a picture taken by a weather satellite. The experience was a revelation, something totally, completely new. In my case, I recall two things that struck me about that first image received at Shannon Airport in the 1960s: amazement that the geographers should have got the shape of Europe so exactly right, and surprise that a depression, viewed from space, appears as a spiral in contrast to the series of concentric circles familiar from the weather map.
Such experiences are now potentially within the reach of every schoolchild. In some countries, and maybe even here for all I know, many second-level schools are equipped with satellite receiving equipment to obtain images from weather satellites. The equipment comprises a special antenna and a standard PC loaded with the necessary software to convert the satellite signals into computer-generated images.
The cost of such a package, prohibitive until a few years ago, has now dropped to the extent that an investment of some hundreds of pounds, combined perhaps with existing computer facilities in the school, may well be sufficient to receive useful and interesting material on a regular basis.
As an alternative, a wide range of real-time satellite images and other meteorological data is freely available on the Internet, as a little "surfing" will almost instantly reveal. Students, naturally enough, are much more interested in studying today's weather situation than they are in doing abstract exercises related to the Leaving Cert curriculum, or manipulating weather data collected many years ago.
The images can be used, not just for teaching students about the weather, but also for activities related to geography, earth sciences, physics, astronomy and environmental studies. More serious students of meteorology can compare satellite pictures with the daily weather map in The Irish Times, identifying the various weather systems, following the tracks of depressions, hurricanes and fronts, and generally becoming familiar with the relationship between the different weather patterns and the corresponding images on satellite.
Why, after all, should the lot of the reluctant student be unleavened? Apart altogether from its usefulness as an aid to one of the questions in the Leaving Certificate Geography paper, a study of the weather can allow students to discover that science can be fun, and that some, at least, of the information they absorb at school may have some usefulness in real life.