Stanford Report, April 1, 1998
Researcher shares joys of science with high schoolers
BY DAVID F. SALISBURY
"Hello from Puenta Arenas, Chile! I am just beginning my trip to Palmer Station, Antarctica, and I thought that I would share some of the pictures from the boat and from my travels up to this point."
So begins the web diary of Michael Johnson, a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford, who recalls being completely turned off by the normal textbook and laboratory treatment of science in high school. Johnson's dream is that his electronic diary will give some of today's high school students the sense that science can be a real adventure by exposing them to an actual science experiment.
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As part of an educational outreach program, Johnson will exchange e-mail messages with interested students from five high schools in Colorado and three in eastern Canada. These students have direct access to experimental data, and Johnson will suggest research projects that they can pursue. He welcomes participation by students from other schools.
Johnson's opportunity to act as an electronic diarist stems from an ambitious scientific project called HAIL (Holographic Array for Ionospheric Lightning) that is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. The experiment employs very low frequency (VLF) transmissions used for communications by the U.S. Navy to study how electromagnetic pulses generated by lightning strokes affect the ionosphere, a region of electrically charged particles that exists about 60 miles overhead.
Each minute about 1,000 lightning strokes take place around the world, making lightning a vital link in what scientists call the global electric circuit, the flow of electrical charge between the ground and atmosphere. Scientists know very little about the subject, even though it may have an important influence on Earth's climate.
Project HAIL, which is headed by electrical engineering Professor Umran Inan, is designed to shed new light on one link in this circuit. By measuring changes in the strength and phase of VLF radio signals that travel intercontinental distances, the researchers have begun to measure the size, shape and duration of changes in the ionosphere caused by lightning episodes. From this information, they expect to put together a comprehensive picture of lightning's impact on the upper atmosphere.
"Radio remote sensing methods allow us to probe regions of the atmosphere too high for weather balloons and too low for orbiting satellites," Inan says. The only other means for taking these observations is by using rockets, which are more costly and also impractical in populated regions.
To gather this information, the researchers needed to set up ground stations located in areas where the receivers can pick up VLF signals after they have passed through areas of high lightning activity.
"The stations are largely automated, but require some attention. So we thought, 'What better place than high schools?'" Inan says. The researchers included the idea, coupled with an educational outreach program, in their proposals to the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. The funding agencies were enthusiastic about the proposal, and high schools have proven very responsive, Inan reports.
In less than two years the Stanford research team has set up receiving stations in eight high schools, five in Colorado and three in eastern Canada. Johnson has visited all of the schools and given talks to the teachers and students explaining how the instruments work and what they are measuring. The researchers also arranged funding that allowed a teacher and student from one of the participating schools to attend an American Geophysical Union meeting last year.
Johnson and his colleagues have taken the time to develop web pages and interactive tutorials that explain their experiment to the high school students. They are also developing a Java data-viewing program that allows the students to view and download experimental data over the Internet.
The HAIL experiment generates gigabytes worth of data, and the Stanford researchers only have the time and staff to examine about 10 percent of it in detail. "So there are spectacular events and important science discoveries hidden in the data that high school students can uncover," Johnson says.
In addition to the new high school ground stations, the Stanford researchers also maintain a VLF receiver at Palmer Station. Flux lines in the Earth's geomagnetic field that originate in the Midwestern United States loop out into space and terminate in this part of the Antarctic. Lightning not only affects the gaseous atmosphere that surrounds the globe, but also perturbs the magnetic atmosphere, or magnetosphere, that surrounds Earth. The Palmer Station receiver allows the scientists to record the magnetic effects of Midwest lightning storms at the same time that the high school stations record the ionospheric effects.
"There is great interest among the students here," says Matt Lewis, a math and science teacher at Gonzaga High School in St. John's, Newfoundland. "We think it is fantastic to be involved in cutting-edge university research. We have one of our students monitoring the HAIL equipment and two who are analyzing data."
Lewis doesn't know how many of his students will follow Johnson's Antarctic trip on the web, but he is encouraging them to do so and making certain that they know how to get to the website.
According to Jim Cihura, the science teacher at Trinidad High School in Trinidad, Colo., this is a "great program for high school students. It gives them the opportunity to find out about something that is going on that otherwise they would know nothing about."
Although his high school doesn't have an Internet connection fast enough to download data directly Ð the students must go to a nearby junior college to do so Ð the project has had an invigorating effect on the students who have a genuine interest in science, Cihura says.
Says Johnson, "If
this gets just one student hooked on science, then it
will be worth all the effort." SR