Dan And The Kids’ Weather Station

Here is a great story about a Dad and his two kids and leaders in the making. Dan Levin runs Caulfield South Weather Station in Melbourne, with his two young children, Rachel and Elliot. This – as far as Dan knows – is the only known professional world class weather station devoted entirely to kids.

The mandate of the station is to:

• allow kids to learn from, interact with and become active leaders in our community
• understand our weather and climate and its impacts upon our society and environment at large

Above all kids learn and they have fun!

The station is recognized and respected by the Bureau Of Meteorology and it is their reference site for electronic weather monitoring for schools and kids in Australia.

A recent addition to the weather station which has recently come online is a water conservation system indicating how wet a garden can be even if it appears dry at surface level. In this way it will encourage water conservation and hopefully people will save more water.

The site is averaging around 250,000 hits per month, which Dan feels must mean it’s being used out there!

Heaps Of Runs On The Board

The Weather Station has also:

• been featured in ‘We are what we do’ producers of ‘Change the World For Ten Bucks’
• is currently a Sunsmart Champion in Victoria for Sunsmart
• had a cover story feature written by the Australian Jewish News in Melbourne
• had a story published by CSIRO in ECOS magazine

It’s likely they will be featured soon in Australasian Science, another national publication.

Dan On Leadership

“It is my personal belief that our kids who will be the leaders of tomorrow should become knowledgeable about our weather and climate so when they sit around the board room tables making important economic decisions, they consider not only the economic bottom line, but also the impacts those decisions will have upon society and the environment at large.

An active example of this leadership is through the work I do at Caulfield Junior College. They run the ‘UV & Me Project’, a project designed to use valid real time data from the station and communicate it to their community.

Here is what the school does:
Kids are chosen to be part of the ‘UV Team’. The UV Index is measured by our instrumentation and made directly available on the school website (every 15 minutes). When it reaches a value of 3 or more, a special UV flag is then run up the school flag pole which is a signal to the rest of the school community that UV is now harmful and that everyone should become sun smart.

In this way, kids learn about UV, not only academically, but also actively and this is then communicated responsibly to a wide community. This is the leadership I refer to.”