Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, make extensive use of models in their daily work. For example, in order to simulate the effects of climate change, they run complex models of the atmosphere on a supercomputing cluster that provides approximately 14 billion floating point operations per second. However, not every model requires this much computing power. In order to create less complex models, some scientists are turning to STELLA.

A three-day workshop was recently conducted by HPS at UCAR for staff from three groups-the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group (ESIG), the Office of Education and Outreach (EO), and the Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET). These groups are now using STELLA in their daily work. During the workshop, the participants covered the basics of Systems Thinking as well as the software mechanics. Approximately 50% of the workshop was devoted to working on individual or group projects, whose focus ranged in scope from modeling the effects of drought on Denver's water supply to calculating the growing seasons for a greenhouse on Mars and simulating the "flow" of scientists through their careers at NCAR. The workshop was quite useful to the participants, and it is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the growing potential for STELLA usage at NCAR.

ESIG, in cooperation with EO & COMET, is currently working on a project to create a game for use in undergraduate courses. It will present teams of players with the opportunity to assume the roles of community leaders who are dealing with the dynamics of a natural disaster such as a hurricane landfall. Although still in development, it is anticipated that the game will take the form of a computer-mediated board game, somewhat along the lines of Dennis Meadows' Fishbanks, Ltd.

A series of workshops incorporating STELLA are scheduled at NCAR for this summer. ESIG will hold the "Advanced Institute on Urbanization, Emissions, and the Global Carbon Cycle" in Boulder later this summer. This three-week institute, supported by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, will convene young natural and social scientists, engineers, and urban planners from developing countries to critically examine the most environmentally significant interaction of cities with their environments, including the emission of both long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived polluting gases and particulates. Each participant will receive a laptop computer and a license for STELLA Research, along with intensive training on the exercise, modification, and construction of STELLA models.

EO will host two workshops that feature STELLA. The first, entitled the "Climate and Global Change Geoscience Education Workshop," (http://www.ucar.edu/educ_outreach/gew ) will bring together 20 middle and high school teachers from across the US together for two weeks to explore all aspects of the geosciences related to climate and global change. Participants will experience presentations by leaders in scientific research, training in hands-on and computer-based activities, field trips, project work, and discussions about pedagogy, educational standards, dissemination, and follow-up. Approximately two days of this workshop will be devoted to STELLA modeling. During the STELLA training, the teachers will construct a simple working model of the global carbon cycle while learning the basic software mechanics. The teachers will be exposed to other models, such as those simulating classic predator-prey dynamics. During last year's workshop, half the teachers indicated their intentions to acquire STELLA for their schools and incorporate modeling into their curricula.

EO's second two-week workshop, sponsored by NASA's Earth System Enterprise, is entitled "Modeling in the Geosciences." This workshop (http://www.ucar.edu/educ_outreach/mgw ) will introduce 20 middle and high school educators to modeling concepts, provide opportunities to learn about state-of-the-art Earth system models used by scientists, and provide training on models that can be used in the classroom to explore Earth system concepts relevant to curriculum needs of educators as expressed in the National Science Education Standards. STELLA will be used on a daily basis as the "hands-on" modeling tool. Each teacher will leave the workshop with a collection of models that can be used to convey concepts in the geosciences to their middle and high school students, and a STELLA site license for his or her school.

It is safe to say that STELLA has found a new home in the Rockies.

* The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) manages both the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the UCAR Office of Programs. UCAR, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is a consortium of over 66 universities throughout North America that grant doctoral degrees in the atmospheric and related sciences, plus an increasing number of academic and international affiliates and corporate partners.

Dennis Ward is the Web Technologist for UCAR's Office of Education and Outreach in Boulder, Colorado. He has a B.A. from the Univ. of Alabama in Birmingham and a M.S. in Astronomy from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. His major interests include K-12 geoscience education and the dynamics of the primordial solar system. Dennis has been with UCAR for eight years, working on numerous distance learning projects, web sites, and multimedia presentations. Before joining UCAR, he was a training consultant in the private sector, specializing in the pulp & paper industry. He served in the U.S. Navy as an officer on board the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69). He is a member of the American Geophysical Union.