I am creating curriculum about climate change with the help of statisticians at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute in RTP. Dr. Richard Smith had graciously agreed to mentor me for my Kenan Fellowship year. The essential question of this project is reflected in the title of the externship and fellowship offer: “Climate Extremes: Are storms larger, more frequent, or both?”

What I hope to design is a unit plan that includes background information about climate change, specifically from professionals researching and using climate information; the use of statistics in climate science and some reasons why climate statistics and interpretation are sometimes considered controversial in the lay community; an understanding of line of best fit and the concept of regression; hand calculations of the value of r2 as a measurement of the relationship between values in a data set; use of statistical freeware such as R; correctly extrapolating and interpolating values on a graph including r2; and teaching line of best fit (as it applies to climate data) to younger students.

(As soon as Dr. Smith returns from his 4th of July holiday, I will add a picture of the two of us!)