Preprints  

Field skills training is an important part of geoscience education, but long field courses away from home can be barriers to geoscience education and mean that students don't get regular field skills practice. We built the Rock Garden, an on-campus field course at Ghent University, Belgium, to make our field skills training more accessible. We show that using more accessible, local training resources like the Rock Garden increases students' confidence during real-world field work.

A methodology is developed for assessing the quality of education in Water Resources Engineering as a sub-discipline of Civil Engineering. It is based on Klein's learning model and using the hybrid fuzzy-AHP-TOPSIS method. The relative closeness of universities as a performance evaluation criterion was obtained. The sensitivity analysis was performed based on some qualitative criteria on the model. This model of evaluation can have a considerable influence on the education improvement.

We used 3D-printed building blocks (TotBlocks) in an undergraduate optical mineralogy lab session to illustrate the links between crystal structures and the optical properties of minerals. Students built mica, pyroxene, and amphibole structures. We observed improved understanding of cleavage (how minerals break) and pleochroism (how light interacts with minerals), but understanding did not improve with more abstract concepts. TotBlocks hold potential as a teaching tool in mineralogy classrooms.

The study demonstrates that environmentally driven animated films can shape the discourse of their audiences. This study also demonstrates how narratives from films such as The Lorax and Tomorrow can lead an audience to consider large-scale environmental issues.

I converted various CO₂ records into music for the piano. This resulted in a statistical piece with five movements and includes musical elements. This conveys a truly unique sonic experience of climate change, and portrays the severe acceleration of emissions. The composition, playable on the piano, conveys climate urgency and the medium of music increases accessibility, audience, and memorability, conveying the immersive experience of climate change that the data deserves.

We evaluate the communication and open data processing of satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data, which measures ground deformation. We discuss the unique interpretation challenges and the use of automatic data processing and web tools to broaden accessibility. We link these tools with an analysis of InSAR communication through Twitter in which applications to earthquakes and volcanoes prevailed. We discuss future integration with disaster risk reduction strategies.

"Bold statements”, are motivating, easily conceived, but often inaccurate. The study seeks the origin, purpose, and threats of such statements in climate science communication. Bold statement communication is enforced by the urgency of climate change and is useful in raising public awareness and accelerating law-making. However, we demonstrate through three well-known case studies of bold statement communication that such communication strategies encompass risks as misinterpretation lurks.

To contribute advancing education in a warming climate and prepare next generations to play their role in future societies, we designed "Water and Us", a three-module initiative focusing on the natural and anthropogenic water cycle, climate change, and conflicts. Results from 40+ hours of events confirm that students are generally aware of climate change (90 %), but have sparse knowledge of the concrete actions that are in place to mitigate or adapt (up to 20 %).

When constructing graphical environmental forecasts involving uncertainty it is important to consider the background and expertise of end-users. Using novel eye-tracking methods, we show that where people look and the decisions they make are both strongly influenced by prior expertise and the graphical construction of forecast representations common in presentations of environmental data. We suggest that forecasters should construct their presentations carefully bearing these factors in mind.

It is vital that uncertainty in environmental forecasting is graphically presented to enable people to use and interpret it correctly. Using novel eye-tracking methods, we show that where people look and the decisions they make are both strongly influenced by construction of forecast representations common in presentations of environmental data. This suggests that forecasters should construct their presentations carefully so that they help people to extract important information more easily.

Our pedagogic framework suggests that using living labs for educational purposes can provide environments where authentic activities and assessment can be readily provided, create an environment where students become stakeholders in adjunct processes, help educators work toward inclusive and authentic alternatives to residential fieldwork (where needed), and provide alternative fieldwork (and other activities) locations to help rationalise curricula financial and environmental footprints.

The news media has been identified as one of the ways weather hazard risk can be communicated. However, hazards become subject to newsworthiness. Here, it is presented that the media focus of Northern Hemisphere Summer 2021 was storms and flooding. This is despite the fact there were also a number of high profile extremes for heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

Current science communication initiatives in universities draws from media and journalism to encourage scientists to be competent communicators of their research in order to show the relevance of scientific knwowledge to societal concerns. An alternative but less popular source of inspiration is from marketing and public relations. Here, science communication is reappraised through the lens of three leading marketing paradigms: 'make and sell', 'sense and respind' and 'guide and co-create'.

Geoscience courses, such as geology and geomorphology, require not only classroom lessons and laboratory exercises, but field trips as well. Here, we performed a virtual navigation on Naxos Isl., Cyclades (Greece) for a series of virtual field trips, which took place during webinars in the framework of Erasmus+ CIVIS. Taking into consideration the feedback from 100 students we evaluate the effectiveness of virtual fieldtrips as an alternative form of education.

GAIA 5.0 presents based on concepts from Plato to Poincaré, the Earth as hypersphere, and as complex living system embedded into a multi-dimensional dynamic space model based on 5-dimensional hyper-Euclidean geometry. It visualizes a coupled atmosphere-ocean dynamics model by using ECMWF reanalysis data sets of the very severe cyclonic storms (Luban & Titli) over the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal (2016). Finally a discrete model for the formation of aerosol is suggested.

We have continued the interdisciplinary study on climate and music and have developed the crosscutting study plans on the climate and cultural understanding education, for promoting the Fundamental ESD Literacy. This review article re-integrates the results of our studies referring to our papers written in Japanese, mainly paying attention to the regional characteristics of the seasonal cycles and the songs/traditional seasonal events around Germany, Northern Europe and Japan.

Everybody experiences weather and has, likely, a grasp on the notion of different climates. There are discussions on how to define climate, since climate is a policy-relevant topic. Here, I try to clarify why the saying Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get is an appropriate definition that, however, depends on the definition of what may be seen as weather.

The measurement of knowledge transfer is considered an important component of the overall performance assessment of research groups. It is, however, not a trivial task, because there is agreement on neither the definition nor on the logical structure of knowledge. In this paper related problems are summarized and approaches to the measurement of knowledge transfer are critically discussed.

A simulation tool has been realized with which the sensitivity of the Earth climate system to human interference can be studied. The tool is intended to offer users of the software, e.g. students in higher education, support in gaining insight into critical aspects of the climate system and thus counteracting common misconceptions with regard to the functioning of this system. The conceptual design of the tool is based on the paradigm learning as experimenting.