MSC/COMET Winter Weather Course Home Page

The Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), in conjunction with the Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET®), will hold its Second Winter Weather Forecasting Course February 17th to March 1st 2002 at the COMET facility in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The Alaska Region of the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS), who have joined as partner in the MSC/COMET training initiative, will also be taking part. Funding for the MSC/COMET training initiative is provided through the Environment Canada Learning Fund.

Representatives from all five MSC Regions, from Aviation and Defence Services and from the Canadian Meteorological Centre will be participating. NWS will be sending six participants including three from Alaska. Course instructors include professors from leading US and Canadian Universities as well as experts from the MSC and the NWS.

Following input from the evaluations provided by participants in the inaugural course in 2001, much of the most valued material will be repeated. New material and instructors have also been added which will hopefully further enhance the learning experience.

The course will once again focus on hazardous winter season meteorology, from the synoptic scale to the mesoscale. The ultimate goal of the course is for participants to increase their understanding of winter weather phenomena and then to transfer this knowledge to local forecast centre meteorologists. To further enable this knowledge transfer, efforts will be made to make available as much of the material as possible for the participants to take back to their offices as Power-Point presentations or as Web-based modules.

Once again comprehensive evaluations will form an important part of the course structure. This will enable further improvements to be made in subsequent classroom based courses and also help design other learning materials and methods to help fulfill the MSC goal of developing a sound scientific basis for the forecasting process.

MSC/COMET Winter Weather Course
17 February - 1 March 2002 

COURSE SCHEDULE

• Participant Registration
• Pre-course Reading
• Post-course Questionnaire
• Logistical Information
• Students
• Instructors
• Regional Presentation Topics
• Directions to COMET
• First Day Info -- IMPORTANT Information
• GARP Tutorial
• Vis5D Tutorial

For information on the MSC/COMET Winter Weather Course or on any other COMET Course, contact Dr. Greg Byrd @ byrd@comet.ucar.edu or for help in other areas:

• Administration Support adminhelp@comet.ucar.edu

COMET Classroom Education and Teletraining Home Page