Using NOAA Observations In Concert with Community Resilience Tools for Fire and Flood Resilience in the Colorado Rockies

Community resilience tools are an increasingly important component in classroom education. Leveraging significant resources available through Colorado State University, including tools from the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, a NOAA Cooperative Institute, a summer workshop for eleven teachers along the Colorado Front Range to improve resilience against wildfire and flash flooding was hosted in July 2018. Teachers learned to use several tools for assessing risk to wildfire and flooding, including the Colorado Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal (CO-WRAP) and NOAA's Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (AHPS), among other tools. In addition, teachers learned the fundamentals of designing resilience projects, using the State of Colorado and Larimer County Resiliency frameworks, and had hands-on experience with all phases of resiliency. Teachers also learned to utilize NOAA resources such as the Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Real-Time (SLIDER), which provides realtime observations from the NOAA GOES-R mission, including flooding and realtime fire observations. Teachers also met with subject-matter experts, to include the Colorado State Climatologist, resiliency modeling researchers who explained how communities plan for disaster, and an incident meteorologist from the National Weather Service who provided first-hand knowledge of wildfire behavior in the wildland-urban interface. Finally, the teachers performed a field day workshop exploring a home devastated in the High Park Fire of 2012, including observations of resilient building, defensible space, and flood mitigation on burn-scarred terrain.

Teachers are following up in a collaborative project highlighting resiliency efforts in a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds and resource availability. Results from the workshop will be presented, including followup in-classroom projects demonstrating continuing efforts to broaden resilience education incorporating NOAA assets in the classroom.